L. Ron Hubbard orchestrates Operation Goldmine in Clearwater, Florida, purchasing landmarks via front organizations like Southern Land Sales while infiltrating local society and suing Mayor Gabrielle Casares after a tailor identifies him. His paranoia escalates with a staged hit-and-run to discredit the mayor, paralleling the massive Operation Snow White where Guardian Office agents steal thousands of DOJ files and forge bomb threats against Paulette Cooper. Following his son Quinton's 1976 suicide, which the church suppresses by hiding medical records, 134 FBI agents raid Scientology headquarters in 1977, convicting 11 members while leaving Hubbard as an unindicted co-conspirator, revealing a Cold War-era spy network that controls local development and targets mental health professionals. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:02
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajinista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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Conspiracy Theories Spawned00:14:36
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What's Elron my Hubbards?
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about the very worst people in all of history.
And today is our super special conclusion episode of the life of L. Ron Hubbard.
And with me today to talk about the last 10 years of the craziest man in history's life is Michael Swame and Abe Epperson.
Hi.
Hi.
Thank you for having us.
I was making cheering and crowd sounds with my mouth.
Oh, it's up.
I thought it's not a mechanical thing.
I didn't do a good job.
I thought you just did that for every 10 minutes to like seep out all the saliva from your mouth.
No.
You know what I do when I fuck something up like that, though?
As I toss my throw-in bagels out.
Oh!
You did!
Oh, I was aware of the throwing bagel trope.
I thought they were individually throwing bagels.
This is a three-pack.
This is a three-pack, yeah.
He's angry.
And they bounced right off the wall and back to me.
So I'm rearmed with my throw-in bagels.
We're also in a room with dozens of panels you could have targeted.
You targeted one right by someone's head.
Well, that's because the nature of the bounce means it won't hit Sophie if I hit the board to her left.
It'll bounce right back to me.
I'm an expert.
I love that you keep them contained in the bag, though, so your vigilanteism is at least kind.
I didn't want to get those numbers everywhere.
Exactly.
Like you get ants and rats and stuff.
Yeah, that's how you get rats.
Yeah.
And I don't want rats inside the house.
I only want rats in the houses of my enemies.
There's only the government acceptable level of rat in this studio, and I appreciate that.
Yeah, which is five.
Yeah, that's the max.
Same as peanut butter.
Which is why there's so many rats.
That's why they open peanut butter jars from back when I had throwing peanut butter.
They were trying to rescue their rat friends who were in the peanut butter jars.
See, I have five rats at home, too, and I'm in like a ratatouille situation.
Haven't seen that movie, but I think a guy cooks rats into food and then serves them to the people of France.
Abe's eating rats.
Abe's eating odd rats.
That's what he's trying to say.
The version of ratatouille is the correct one.
Well, I mean, the rent is too damn high in this town.
Literally, eat the odd rat.
Now, did y'all both listen to the three-parter I did on the life of L. Ron Hubbard or LRH?
I did.
I did.
Now, I got to ask before we get in, were you surprised to learn that he, in fact, could fuck?
Oh, I was ready to immediately answer no to everything you said because I've done of, like, he's not the most obscure bastard you've covered.
No, not at all.
I've done my own research, but yeah, that was the one detail.
You found the one detail that was surprising.
I also was very pleased because I'm like, it's not like he needed a win.
No, you know, like, he definitely didn't need a win.
Kind of nailed it.
But it's just kind of one of those, like, just one of those things that, like, life just serves up to you.
Like, reality just says, and circumstance.
Yeah.
And you go, ah, yes, back to nihilism.
That's when, like, you find out Milton Burrell had a foot-long dick, and you're like, why?
But okay.
Okay.
I don't know.
If there's one thing that came across in that book of a thousand Milton Burrell jokes.
I had that as a kid.
Man, you just flashed me back to it.
I haven't thought of it in 20 years.
And I remember thinking as a seven-year-old reading that, I bet this guy had a fucking salami that could have knocked a dog's head off.
Just as a little child, imagining that.
It was dedicated to his testicles for all the weight they bear.
As a kid, I just didn't think anything of that.
No, it just seemed like a normal old comedian talking about his balls.
Speaking of old comedians talking about their balls, or not speaking of that at all, when we last left L. Ron Hubbard, he'd just come ashore in Florida after multiple years of shirking all the laws of land and most of the laws of sea.
Old, ill, and as crazy as a cat with an inner ear infection, Hubbard launched Operation Goldmine.
This was his plan to create the mecca of Scientology, an entire city dedicated to the religion where Scientologists could rule one another and other people based on the enlightened principles of their glorious religion.
Now, you guys are going to build a mecca to your own personal religions.
Where do you pick?
Oh, boy.
Well, you got, see, this is an improv rule.
You know, you're on the spot.
First answer, no censorship.
What came to mind was Portland, Oregon.
No, that's a great place to have a call.
That's where I plan to have a call.
I'm afraid of them seeing you, but also because I've often, that's been at the top of my list of other places to live when and if I leave L.A.
But I also heard your episode about, in part, the history of Portland, so I feel bad saying that.
I would put mine on top of Mount Rushmore.
Way better.
You have more time to think.
Yeah, well, yeah, I have more time to think, yeah.
In general, on Mount Rushmore.
Question is, would it be your face?
Is your mecca in the shape of your face?
It could be whatever the fuck I want.
Okay.
Just you frowning down on four presidents on my ongoing battle to beat the president.
That is what we know about Abe.
Well, L. Ron Hubbard was, as I think we've established, the craziest man who ever lived.
He's a contender in that.
And as the craziest man who ever lived, he picked the craziest state.
And I say this as a Texan.
Nobody beats Florida in the crazy state lottery.
It's got to be Florida.
And of course, L. Ron Hubbard picked the city of Clearwater, Florida.
Now, there was a downside to this, which is that the site that L. Ron Hubbard and his minions selected for their faith's new capital was already occupied by tens of thousands of people who were not Scientologists.
This was a problem, but not an insurmountable one because L. Ron Hubbard has had, as he had, you know, most of our last.
Conspiracy theory just spawned.
Oh, it's not a theory.
No, it has.
Hello.
He's popping around.
Oh, he's still alive.
I hope his head's frozen in a jar.
I'd like to see him get one more act.
I'd like to see him and Ted Williams' head fight each other someday.
Sure.
Just rolling around.
It's one of those things where after everything we went through in the first three episodes, it's shocking to me how much gas this guy had left in the tent.
This is only the last decade, right?
This is the last like 10 years of his life.
Camera that home again.
This is the Game of Thrones finale episode.
This is not the whole run.
Most dictators get a two-part, maybe a three-part.
Like, L. Ron Hubbard, this is a five-parter audio.
Wait, there's more.
Yeah.
So, Clearwater, Florida, is located west of Tampa and north of St. Petersburg, on the far edge of Florida's Midwest coast.
Yep, it has a fine harbor, which was good because L. Ron Hubbard still fancied himself a Commodore.
And as you pointed out there, Michael, the city's name, Clearwater, made it a perfect fit with L. Ron Hubbard's religious canon.
Because, of course, Clear is the state of being like high.
Going clear.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the whole goal in the Scientology canon.
In 1975, when a disguised L. Ron Hubbard arrived with his retinue, Clearwater was a sleepy retirement community.
It went by the nickname Sparkling Clearwater, and a third of its 100,000 citizens were over 65.
It was not a place that prided itself on hustle and bustle.
The town's most prominent building was the old Fort Harrison Hotel, an increasingly decrepit monument to Clearwater's glory days.
The hotel was empty and for sale.
In October, the Southern Land Sales and Development Corporation purchased the old hotel.
The local attorney who represented the building's old owners called it one of the strangest transactions he'd ever seen.
The building's new buyers had paid $2.3 million in cash for the building, and the fact that they had $2.3 million in cash was literally all he knew about them.
The buyers would not even admit to having a telephone number.
Good little smell of grift code.
It's almost impressive they didn't run afoul of Disney operatives buying land out from Florida residents if we're going to expand any group like crazier and wealthier than the Disney Corporation in this period of time.
Definitely.
It's the Church of Scientology.
Now it's Disney.
I mean, we all have a lot, like, humans have a long history of just like, if you get enough people and put them in a spot, you can declare that yours.
Yeah.
Which is exactly what I plan to do someday in Oregon.
You get a bunch of people.
You guys saw that documentary, Wild, Wild Country.
Yes.
Like, that literally is my goal.
Minus poisoning that town, probably.
I saw the first one.
Probably.
It's the important.
And I was like, it's kind of boring.
They're not culty enough for my, like, the part of me that wants to watch it.
And everyone said something happened.
So now I know they poison a town.
Yeah, they poison the shit out of a town.
Yeah, we're past spoiler range.
I think they were kind of on the right, though.
Anyway, let's move on past the middle of the day.
Yeah.
Less than a week later, the Southern Land Development Corporation bought another of the city's landmarks, the Bank of Clearwater building.
They paid $550,000, again, in cash.
Now, residents started talking after this, and they talked even more when a strange old man in a green jumpsuit showed up in town and publicly announced that the Southern Land Company would be leasing the buildings to a group called the United Churches of Florida.
He claimed that the United Churches would host religious meetings and seminars there.
Now, this perplexed local journalists.
They could find no records anywhere of the United Churches of Florida ever existing.
This was because there was no United Churches of Florida or Southern Land Development Company for that matter.
Both organizations were, of course, fronts for the Church of Scientology.
On December 5th, L. Ron Hubbard officially announced Project Power 3, aka Operation Normandy.
I shave with that.
It gets really close to the grain.
It's a very good thing.
It's got those three blades.
Yeah, yeah.
You say that with a full beard.
Look, no one at this table shaves regularly.
The literature, the literature they handed me made me understand that I am clean-shaven.
The Scientology razor works.
This is just my sin coming out of my face past.
Yeah, he's clear-shaven.
I'm going to get it audited away.
Yeah, you're shaved on the inside, which is where little hairs, little thetans, it's all the same stuff.
Now, the purpose of Operation Normandy was, quote, to fully investigate the Clearwater City and County area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed.
Hubbard's overall plan to accomplish this was, quote, to locate opinion leaders, then their enemies, the dirt, scandal, vested interest, crime of the enemies with overt data as much as possible.
Then turn this over to United Churches who will approach the opinion leader and get his agreement to look into a specific subject, which will lead to the enemy's crimes.
United Churches then discovers the scandal, etc., and turns it over to the opinion leader for his use.
Ops can be done as a follow-up to remove or restrain the enemy.
So just gets right into it with how do we deal with our enemies that we're gonna make.
That's his tool is to blackmail so quick.
Like he doesn't, like someone introduces you by pointing him across the room at a party like, oh yeah, that's my friend Elrond.
He's got dirt on you.
Damn, that was fast.
Yeah.
I mean, he's like in his 60s at this point.
He's experienced.
He knows he doesn't pussyfoot around.
Like it's time to, we're going to make enemies.
So we need a plan to destroy them.
Our mob boat has reached land.
Begin discovering everyone's sins.
You know in like video games where you're supposed to like you have like offense and defense and you have to power them both up?
He's done this enough to know he's like, well, it's going to be ahead of the curve on the defense.
He's been playing for a long time.
Exactly.
Now, one of these enemies was a reporter for the Clearwater Sun named Mark Sableman.
Mark had been sniffing around the church's operations in Clearwater and had revealed some evidence that suggested the United Churches were really the church of Scientology.
And so, on January 26th, 1976, a church official named Joe Lisa wrote up a scheme to get Mark fired.
Quote, have a woman, elderly, go into the office and in grief and miss emotions start screaming that she wants to see Sableman's boss.
She goes in and sees this man and screams and cries about Sableman sexually assaulting her son or grandson.
The woman takes a magazine which is lurid and perverted and throws it into the face of the man-woman and screams, look what he gave my son.
Not to mention what the pervert did, sob sob to my Johnny.
I'm going to the police.
If you can't do something about that pervert, Sableman, I will see that they do something to you.
So, journalist reveals the very basic detail that they're secretly buying up land.
And that this is going.
Yeah.
And that at one point in time, Sab Sab to my Johnny was a friend of mine.
That's literally how it's written.
Sab Sab to my Johnny.
That's like a song you would hear at the Sock Hop.
Or like, it could be kind of like a greeting too, like, Sab Sab to my Johnny!
That should be your time for next episode.
Sab Sab, my Johnny's.
What's Sab and Majanis?
There we go.
Yeah.
Throughout later 1975 and early 1976, Clearwater flooded with young uniformed Scientologists.
They began renovating the church's new acquisitions downtown.
Their presence was strange and discomforting for locals, since the newcomers refused to answer questions on who they worked for and what they were doing.
Hubbard himself supervised the construction efforts from five miles away in a condominium complex in the nearby town of Dunedin.
During his few visits into Clearwater, he posed as a photographer.
His initial plan was to sneak into a respected position in local society by posing as a photographer, taking pictures to encourage local tourism.
In a letter to one member of the Guardian Office, which was the chunk of the Church of Scientology aimed at protecting L. Ron Hubbard, he wrote, quote, taking pictures of beautiful Clearwater is the local button.
My portrait of the mayor will hang in the city hall.
Never fear.
So pretentious.
First of all, it's clear that he was like, well, I'm not going to live there.
Find me the nerdiest sounding town.
I got to live in a J.R. Tolkien named town.
I am L. Rond, after all.
Yeah, he is.
L. Rond and Dunaden.
Yeah, he's an elf who collided with a space telescope, L. Ron Hubble, right?
Which actually just turns out to be an orc.
But secondly, is he allowed back on land?
I thought he was going to get arrested.
Oh, yeah.
No, he's not allowed.
That's why he's always in disguise and hiding.
So he's like on the.
I mean, because I thought the boat was his sort of final solve for evading the law, but even in this late stage, he's like, I'm risking it.
He's risking it now.
He's being hidden at this point.
He has a whole team of people.
The Guardian Office is just there to keep people off his back.
Which would sound silly if you hadn't just dropped the KKK episode.
Yeah.
They're like the exalted Cyclops.
Oh, yeah, and the King Kliegel.
Oh, the Klavy.
Yeah.
The Clavies, my Klavy.
Unfortunately for L. Ron Hubbard, the mayor of Clearwater had no interest in being photographed by a strange old man.
He was deeply concerned with this army of anonymous invaders.
Mayor Discredit Scheme00:09:20
At one point, he reached out to the United Churches and said, I am discomforted by the increasing visibility of security personnel armed with billy clubs and mace employed by the United Churches of Florida.
I am unable to understand why this degree of security is required by a religious organization.
You see F more like UFC, am I right?
It's like a reasonable question.
Yes, it seems like he brought an army to our sleepy retirement town.
And also, why?
A Catholic priest walking down a cobblestone street, like, oh, how you doing, lads, just smacking a nightstick into his hand.
That is discomforting.
Yeah, I think that's the perfect word.
That is, that is the perfect word.
It became clear that the Scientologists would need to stage a reveal of their organization to the people of Clearwater.
In early 1976, they held a meeting at the Fort Harrison Hotel, officiated by L. Ron Hubbard himself.
He wore a beret, khaki fatigues, and headphones, and local religious leaders watched in wonder and confusion as this bizarre man presided over the setup of microphones and stage-managed the production of the press conference down to the tiniest detail.
He was introduced as Mr. Hubbard, an engineer.
We could have caught him!
Why didn't they get him?
One of the one again, one of the through lines of any time you read about criminals in the 70s, like the FBI really wasn't very good at its job.
I mean, you could debate whether or not they still are, but everyone was kind of asleep at the wheel until September 11th, which, you know, is part of why September 11th happened.
Right.
It's almost as if in the human narrative, there's incompetence has always been with us.
Yes.
Especially of those of power.
Yeah.
Shouldn't have been super hard to find L. Ron Hubbard.
Now, 500 local citizens attended the meeting where they were shown the renovations done to the Fort Harrison Hotel.
Scientology representatives tried to reassure them that the church was a fundamentally friendly force with no nefarious aims towards their town.
A spokesman for the church told them, Scientologists are people who don't drink or violate laws.
They are friendly and want to contribute.
The very next day, the Church of Scientology filed a $1 million lawsuit against the mayor of Clearwater, Gabrielle Casares, suing him for libel, slander, and a bevy of civil rights violations.
A few days after announcing his presence in Florida and instantly suing the mayor of the town, L. Ron Hubbard went out to get a suit tailored near Dunaden.
It turned out that the tailor was a science fiction fan, and since Ron was a proud narcissist, he immediately revealed his identity to the fan and told him he was staying nearby.
The news percolated through the local rumor mill, and before long, it was common knowledge that the prophet of Scientology was hanging out in Dunaden rather than Clearwater.
Now, at the time, there were numerous pending lawsuits and investigations against the church, and the fact that Hubbard's location had been revealed by himself made him incredibly paranoid.
Within days of revealing himself to Clearwater, he and his entourage fled 1,200 miles north to Georgetown.
Hubbard grew a beard and bought a new wardrobe from a local Salvation Army store.
One of his aides, who'd been with him during his long boat journey, noted that it was strange because on the ship he had all these phobias about dust and smells and how his clothes had to be washed, but all that vanished when we were living together in Washington.
He goes boho.
Kind of an Assange arc for him.
Yeah, he had like a second religion family.
He had like two secrets.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh man.
They're just pests though, right?
Like they just, anytime anyone might be a threat, they just throw everything at him.
I'm going to sue you then.
Oh, yeah.
Didn't you hear?
They throw everything at everyone in any area they're in before they get to know anyone.
It's how you react to threats when you have infinite money and are just a lunatic.
And I think it's a sign of your own.
Like, I feel like from your previous episodes, too, he walked around with a lot of darkness inside him.
Like, there are some people who I think have done horrendous things and it really goes off them like water off a duck's back.
His just sheer obsession with, well, everyone's got dirt.
Everyone's got skeletons.
The trick in life is just to find the skeletons first.
That's the act of someone who's like, yeah, I have the most skeletons.
I have so many skeletons.
I kidnapped my own baby.
And if you say anything about these skeletons, I'm going to create new skeletons.
It's also incredible that he...
I wish I could have been there in his head in the moment he's leaving the Taylor's office when it turned from like, it was nice meeting a fan.
I shouldn't have done that.
Oh, L, that was real bad, L. All the crimes you've been committing.
Wait a minute.
Lil Ron.
Lil Ron.
So he goes to Georgetown and grows a beard, like we all do at some point.
Now, while Hubbard hid out in Georgetown, he continued to direct a variety of clandestine operations down in Clearwater.
His main goal was to unseat Gabriel Casarez, who had grown into a figure of almost Luciferian importance to the Scientologist knew it.
He still wants that portrait.
Yeah, they were really worried about his moderate concern about them taking over his town with a paramilitary security force.
According to the book, Barefaced Messiah, quote, Scientologists had gone back to his hometown of Alpine, Texas, trawled through public records, nosed around the courthouse, and even checked the headstones in the local graveyard without success.
But then it was disclosed that Cesarez would be attending the National Mayor's Conference in Washington from 11 or 13 to 17th March, and the Guardian's office made hasty plans to give him a welcome.
A Scientologist posing as a Washington reporter sought an interview with Cesarez and introduced him to a friend, Sharon Thomas, who offered to show the mayor the sights of Washington.
Miss Thomas was, of course, working for the Guardian's office.
Driving with the mayor through scenic Rock Creek Park, she temporarily lost control of her car and ran into a pedestrian who crumpled dramatically.
To the mayor's horror, Miss Thomas accelerated away without stopping, leaving the injured man lying on the road.
Is the injured man also a playant?
Yeah, he's a scientist.
Everyone involved is a Scientologist but the mayor.
This is like a play for no one.
It's like in The Simpsons when they put on a play to convince Mr. Burns to fund the school or some shit.
I wonder if they rehearsed.
Oh, they must have.
They must have.
And it's all for him to fucking.
He had a team always practicing to fake a hit and run just because he knew at some point I'm going to need to run.
I don't want to be in those morning production meetings.
We're just sitting all right.
He was talking last night about not feeling like so great when he's like he's not tall.
So can we just like let's build his platform, make him taller for the moment.
You are our shortest people.
Yeah, they were just I want to see the scenes that they rehearsed that were cut.
Like, okay, in case the mayor gets carried off by a giant bird of prey, we have this great scene worked out.
It never happened.
It just like slays stayed on the cutting room floor.
Yeah.
With the cheatins.
With the theatons.
I get the acting connection now.
Oh, that makes sense.
So they had to do a lot of improv.
We'll be getting a little more into that.
Thomas Cruz.
Yeah.
That was his first role.
Now, the plan was to use this hit and run to discredit the mayor.
A Guardian's office memo noted, I should think the mayor's political days are at an end.
Of course, a faked hit and run committed by someone else did not have the derailing effect on the mayor's career that the Guardian's office is hoped.
But Hubbard was ready the same day with another plan to try and convince Miami's Cuban population that the mayor of Clearwater was pro-Castro.
Like most of L. Ron Hubbard's hairbrain schemes, this one did not bear fruit.
The Commodore cooked up ideas like I Hop Cook's pancakes, poorly and constantly.
But all of his schemes were not half-assed.
And while all this was going on, the Church of Scientology was deep in the middle of the most ambitious scheme of its history to date, Operation Snow White.
On November 9th, 1975, an agent of the church, codenamed Silver, walked into the Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.
He entered the office of attorney Charles Zuvrayan, although he had no legal right to be there, and began taking documents.
He made copies of hundreds of confidential tax documents and then walked out the door with them.
Like the purchase of the Ford Harrison Hotel, this was done under the express orders of L. Ron Hubbard.
The genesis of Snow White had come in 1973, whilst Hubbard and his Sea Org were still trawling international waters.
Multiple nations refused to let the Scientologists dock at their ports, and L. Ron Hubbard decided this was due to a worldwide conspiracy to discredit his church rather than its numerous, numerous crimes.
Everyone thinks I'm an asshole.
Why?
This is a conspiracy.
I'm going to dress up like Spider-Man and ruin his good name.
Hubbard tasks Scientology's investigative arm, the Guardian Office, with countering this false information.
The name Snow White was picked because Hubbard claimed the government's case against him was, in essence, a fable.
Don't call it Operation Fable.
That's way cooler.
Well, he went with Snow White.
All right.
Under the direction of his wife, Mary Hubbard, Operation Snow White would grow into a sprawling infiltration of the U.S. federal government at every level.
Agent Silver's theft of IRS documents was just one part of the scheme.
Agent Silver was really IRS clerk Gerald Wolfe, and in that capacity, he was able to steal more than 30,000 pages worth of documents.
By the beginning of 1975, the church had actually succeeded in placing agents inside the IRS, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the DEA.
Now, this scheme was executed entirely by agents of the Guardian office.
They were trained to lie, or in Scientology terms, outflow false data in order to worm their way into these federal organizations.
That's a good synonym for lie.
I'm wrapping my head around that euphemism.
Outflow synergize the dishonesty.
Also, your name's already Wolf.
Agent Wolf was better than Agent Silver.
I was going to say, or Silver Wolf, or I don't know.
Silver Wolf.
Agent Silver Wolf.
Red Fox.
Outflow False Data00:07:04
No, wait, that was a good one.
Agent Rhett Fox.
Snow Wolf.
He's got a filthy sense of humor, but he gets shit done.
Speaking of fables, you know what's not a fable?
Products?
Yeah, they're real.
Your heart's still in this man.
They're very.
You know what?
I don't need the gun.
I need the gun.
See, I throw the bagels, they come right back to me.
Hey, those are some products.
Yeah.
The services are real, but we are not.
And the throwing bagels are real.
My current throwing bagels are everything bagels, kettle-boiled, and health-baked sliced, the bagel that won the West.
And they're bruising badly, which I didn't think bagels were supposed to do.
The bagel that won the West.
Did I even know that?
Yeah.
Did these wipe out the Cherokee?
Yeah.
Are these genocide bagels that I'm throwing on the wall?
I mean, they're everything, so they're definitely genocide, plus, I guess, everything else.
That's not cool.
Thousands of American bison died with those bagels embedded in their skulls.
Sophie, I want bagels that didn't commit genocide.
Yeah, fair.
Also, these expired February 25th.
I want fresh throwing bagels.
Actually, the expired ones work a little bit better.
So, check out these ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back!
I shouldn't have come back when I was eating.
Yeah, right.
Well, you fully control when you come back, so that was your choice, and you can survive with it.
That's number three for those keeping track.
I hit some equipment with that one, but Daniel says it's fine.
We've returned from examining the ads and examining an antiquated woodworking tool, and I, for one, will purchase one.
Yeah, delicious products or services.
Now, what's not delicious is the throwing bagels that apparently are genocide bagels.
Yeah, I think they're genocide bagels.
I would like to apologize to genocide victims for throwing genocide bagels.
I've heard a lot of words in my time on this earth.
I've never heard the combination tasty genocide.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't eat bagels.
I just throw them, so I don't know if they're tasty.
I can say these are the bounciest of the bagels.
Oh, you're not even vouching for these bagels as edible?
That's why they're throwing bagels, Michael.
All right.
I assumed a throwing bagel could sort of retire and end its life in my little mouth.
Is that not a possibility?
I'm not going to say you can't, but that's not their purpose.
Okay.
They're everything bagels, so you can do anything with them.
This bagel is my everything now.
Including genocide.
Yes, unfortunately.
I guess, yeah, they really are.
Paulette Cooper's Torment00:09:54
Well, if a bagel's everything, it's all good and all in.
It's all good.
It's all on there.
Yeah.
That bagel both invented the seatbelt and killed John Benet Ramsey.
Everything.
And is the spirit of Christmas.
And is the spirit of Christmas, as well as the spirit of St. Louis.
And is that right-wing college kid who led the campaign against wearing seatbelts and died in an accident that he would have lived through if he had worn his seatbelt?
It's all in the bagel, people.
We've gotten too invested in the philosophy of what an everything bagel is.
The cream cheese is Hitler.
I don't ask why.
It's always been that way.
I think we can all agree on that.
All right, let's get back to Ron Hubbard's life.
It's a little bit of bagel.
It's a little bit of bagel.
So, the Guardian Office agents were infiltrating, you know, all these federal agencies, the IRS, the DEA, the Coast Guard.
Much of the data gathered, like the IRS files copied by Agent Silver, was collected in order to help the church deal with its mountain of pending audits.
At this point, it was not a religious institution in the legal sense of the word, but it was still refusing to pay taxes, so the IRS was not super happy.
So it still had not secured the religious exemption?
No, that wasn't until much later.
Now, the Guardian's office also used their connections to the U.S. government to dig up dirt on their political enemies, particularly journalists who dared to write about them.
According to the LA Times, quote, The Guardian Office saved the worst for author Paulette Cooper of New York City, whose scathing 1972 book, The Scandal of Scientology, pushed her to the top of the church's roster of enemies.
Among other things, Cooper was framed on criminal charges by the Guardian office members, who obtained stationery she had touched and then use it to forge bomb threats to the church in her name.
You're like the Nazis or the Arabs.
I'll bomb you.
I'll kill you, warned one of the rambling letters.
The church reported these threats to the FBI and sent the fury of the Bureau crashing down on poor Paulette Cooper.
She was indicted by a grand jury for making bomb threats and for lying under oath about having made the bomb threats.
The truth did eventually come out, but it took two years and cost Paulette $20,000 in legal fees and $6,000 in psychiatric treatment.
Now, Hubbard actually hated Paulette enough that he had the Guardian's office dedicated an entire operation to destroying her, codenamed Freak Out.
I found an article where she recites a small list of the things they did before reporting those fake bomb threats to the FBI.
What are you doing today, honey?
We're destroying this one woman.
We're destroying this lady.
She wrote a book.
Yeah, we're in Q2.
I'm hoping by Q4 she'll be contemplating suicide, you know.
That's the goal.
You know, we all get a bonus if it happens before Q4.
Did the agents who infiltrated the IRS like 99% of the time have to just keep up their cover by doing tax returns?
I think so.
I want to know if a Scientologist operative ever just processed my taxes by chance.
Well, not if you were filing taxes in the late 70s.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
I have a very bad tax cheat, which is I've been filing taxes since before I was born.
I'm hoping it'll pay off today.
I'm going to stop paying taxes early.
Do it.
Here's Paulette Cooper.
Quote, I soon got used to telephone death threats, harassing calls, and lawsuits.
I was occasionally followed, often conspicuously, as if to upset me, and people seemed to be trying to gain access to my apartment.
Then, in the basement of my small building, I discovered alligator clips on my phone wires, likely the remnants of a phone tap.
Next, my cousin, who was also short and slim like me, was in my apartment alone when a man arrived with a flower delivery for me.
When she opened the door, the intruder pulled a gun out of the flowers and put it to her temple.
Fortunately, the gun jammed, misfired, or was empty.
The man then began to choke her, and then when she pulled away and screamed, he ran off.
The police said afterward that they were mystified because there appeared to be no motive for the attack.
I quickly moved to a safer dormant building, but soon afterwards, 300 of my new neighbors received an anonymous smear letter about me, outrageously describing me as a part-time prostitute with venereal disease.
They really showed control with the part-time, though.
They're like, don't dagger through the full-time.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a...
That's a you know the reason why they choose part-time too is that they're like, she can't even be a full prostitute.
That's a different way to take it.
But you know it's the one they took.
She hasn't had varsity sex work yet.
Yeah, she can't entirely subsist off of that.
Yeah.
So she's got to do the writing books about Scientology thing as an off-game.
There's just worse lies and worse lies.
Yeah.
Now, much as I do love talking about the wacky schemes of L. Ron Hubbard, it's important to remember that for every botched fake hit and run, which is just genuinely whimsical and funny, someone like Paulette Cooper was subjected to insane, almost unimaginable torment for the crime of writing a book that angered L. Ron Hubbard.
Murder.
Well, it seems like it might have been actually just a torture technique, like where they were never planning to shoot her, but like that's a thing that you'll do.
Like I talked to someone who was in an Iranian prison and tortured for a while, and fake executions were a common thing.
The CIA did it too with people we captured in Iraq, where you put a gun to their head and pull the trigger, but it's not loaded because that just really fucks with people.
I guess because he went on to choke her, it makes you imagine he really was sent to kill her.
But a jam is also pretty unlikely.
Yeah.
Like as a torture rehearsal?
Like just to fuck her up.
Oh, man.
Yeah, like, yeah, they'll execute a prisoner of war with a son that has no bullets.
Just to be psychologically.
Now you're fucking scientifically.
Enjoy your name in 40 years.
Now, meanwhile, back in Operation Snow White, over the months and years, Scientology spies had made their way into the Department of Justice, placing an operative as the secretary to an assistant U.S. attorney who handled the mountain of FOIA requests filed by the church, Freedom of Information Act requests.
This was the surface legitimate goal of Operation Snow White.
Hubbard framed it as a perfectly legal blizzard of freedom of information requests aimed at trying to figure out just why so many people thought the Church of Scientology was a nefarious entity.
Now, because I'm usually pro-FOIA.
FOIA has been a force for good mostly.
Yep, not in this case.
No.
So because many of these FOIA requests pertain to records that were critical in ongoing investigations into the church's rampant criminal activity, the church would be denied the right to see them, which is, you know, part of how FOIA works.
The church's man in the Justice Department would be able to know when they were like, okay, they requested this document, it's being denied.
And so he would get a copy of the document they were getting denied and then smuggle them out to church authorities.
So this is why they were placed in DOJ.
What sent everyone was on.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, the IRS was L. Ron Hubbard's greatest nemesis outside of the concept of psychiatry, and they were where his guardian office focused most of its efforts.
At one point, an office operative managed to bug an IRS conference room by wiring a recorder into a wall socket that allowed him to listen in on agency meetings via his car's FM radio.
At another point, two Scientologists used their faked IRS credentials to get inside government archives and photocopy documents related to the church.
Now, the head of Operation Snow White was again Mary Sue Hubbard.
And when it all came crashing down, spoiler, she is the one who would take legal blame.
But basically, everyone who has studied the church, or Hubbard, agrees that he was the center of the whole conspiracy.
Yeah, it's almost like people who are scared that everything is conspiracy make conspiracies.
Yeah, do nothing but create conspiracies.
Yeah.
Yeah, because the worldview.
And it's, yes.
It seems like everything is the mafia.
Like, everything works like the mafia.
To get you.
Right.
It's the same.
You just shift the blame to a lower down person.
And there's the concept of lieutenants or made men kind of stuff.
Avon's in the clink for a year, but we got Stringer on the outside and he can run messages to Webay, whatever you need.
Yeah, whatever you need.
Yeah, and in L. Ron Hubbard's case, he's Avon Barksdale.
I guess.
However, he never spends time in a cell.
Yeah, because he's a mythical, he's more of a mythic figure.
Yeah, I do think this is also the first time I've heard of spy work that is too boring to contemplate doing.
Oh my gosh.
Do you want to be a spy?
Yeah, dude.
Okay, go into this IRS office and install a bug.
That's kind of cool.
Now sit in a van and listen to what IRS people say all day.
Drive around listening to the IRS radio.
Are we cops?
Kind of the opposite of cops.
Yep.
New cops.
Spock?
Yeah.
Cops backwards?
I don't know.
Is Spock cops?
That's not how that works.
Cops.
Oh, yeah, it is.
It is.
Cops backward or Spock.
Because they're illogical.
I've always said that Commander Spock is the opposite of a cop.
Yeah.
You know why?
The blue uniform.
No, that doesn't long and prosper.
I'm looking for the fun.
Yeah, I really didn't have anything there.
Okay, you're just hoping somebody was going to pass that ball to somebody comedy now.
Yeah.
And we failed.
It's totally illogical.
Hand over your badge and gun.
Yeah.
And I'm going to throw these bagels right back at my feet.
Number four.
I hate the genocide they were complicit in, but they're damn good throw-in bagels.
Really good throw-in bagels.
Freudian slip, shoving bagels.
Those are different bagels.
You need a littler bagel.
Most orifices are small.
Bagel bites.
Yeah, good for shoving bagels.
I put bagel bites.
Throw-in bagels can be big.
Shoving bagels need to be small enough to fit in most holes.
To just kind of ease in there.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like just a good old-fashioned walk and bagel.
A little walk around town.
You can grab on it.
It's not got too much on the outside.
That's a good walk and bagel.
Back to evil.
Oh, I was ready to talk about shoving bagels more because, you know, if it's bagel bites, they make their own loop.
Do they now?
Back to Scientology.
Bagel bites.
Michael Meisner.
Real good.
Michael Meisner, who was the fake victim of the fake hit and run aimed at destroying the mayor of Clearwater, was also a major part of Operation Snow White.
He personally broke into the Department of Justice several times and organized the copying of tens of thousands of secret files.
Under Meisner's direction, decoding equipment was installed to provide direct secure communication between church headquarters in Clearwater and the Guardian's office in Los Angeles.
Operation Snow White00:11:59
After Virginia, O'Ron Hubbard himself wound up hiding next on Overland Avenue in Cover City, California.
Literally, yeah, that was about a block away from my first home in Los Angeles.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, that's where Hubbard hid after he decided he'd spent too much time in Georgetown and he had to get out of the East Coast.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in mid-1976, with Operation Snow White at its height and Hubbard living in his third undisclosed location since returning to dry land a year ago, Mary Sue Hubbard finally joined back up with her husband to warn him about some major problems not related to the fact they were conducting the largest infiltration of the federal government in U.S. history.
See, it turns out that living on a series of boats and searching for gold for like a decade, committing a vast and dizzying crea of financial crimes, spying on the government, living in a series of safe houses is kind of bad for someone's family life.
He blew up those imaginary submarines.
Yeah, he did blow up those imaginary submarines.
Yeah, yeah.
Keep claiming it.
And didn't the racist guy do it too?
Yes, yes.
George Wagner Rockwell.
They made the same line.
So it's almost like there's a continuity of liars and like wanting to be awesome and making your own message.
You know that song, Everybody Wants to Rule the World?
It's like that, but with blowing up a Japanese submarine.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like cred in those circles.
Yeah.
So yeah, things were not great with the Hubbard family at this point in time.
His daughter, Diana's marriage was falling apart.
His son Quinton was ostensibly in the Sea Org, but was constantly out of pocket and battling crippling depression.
And worst of all, L. Ron Hubbard's daughter, Suzette, was dating non-Scientologists.
Now, Mary Sue suggested that all of these problems could be solved by providing the family with a little bit more stability.
So, using some of the church's literally infinite funds, they bought a gigantic compound in Southern California named La Quinta.
The family moved in that October.
For a while, all was well.
The Commodore's messengers noted that he seemed to be much more relaxed and happier after moving into his new ranch.
This did not last long.
On Wednesday, November 17th, 1976, Hubbard received dire news.
His son Quentin had been found dead in his car in Las Vegas, the victim of a successful suicide.
Mary Sue wept.
L. Ron Hubbard screamed.
That stupid fucking kid.
That stupid fucking kid.
Look at what he's done to me.
Yeah.
What happened to blaming the Thetans, dude?
Yeah.
Like, he should fall to his knees and go, Thetans!
Thetans!
Stole my boy!
I will get him!
You stole my boy, Snake Thetans!
Man, that's tragic.
Yeah, according to Bearface Messiah, quote, the Guardian's office, meanwhile, had moved swiftly to handle the situation.
Its local representative in Las Vegas was a pit boss at the Sands Hotel by the name of Ed Walters.
I had been working as a covert operator for about eight years, he said.
I had secretly tape recorded a psychiatrist and got him to talk about lobotomies to try and discredit him.
And I had bugged the meetings of the Clark County Mental Health Association.
Things like that.
I worked on anything that Org considered to be a threat to the Hubbards.
Who's he saying this to?
This is what he said to the author of Bearface Messiah.
Okay, so he presumably got DPS.
He left the church at some point.
He was just a classic casino pit boss slash spy for the Church of Scientology.
There's your mob connection right there.
So what info is he getting, though?
Like stuff like this.
They want dirt on a psychiatrist, so he gets this guy drunk and bugs him talking about committing lobotomies.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah, I guess lobotomies are pretty cool.
We should do more.
And he's like, well, got you.
You got you, mother.
Cha-ching, another good-ass day for Ed Walters.
So anyway, this is Walters again.
Quote, when they found out Quentin was here, I was told to get a hold of all of his medical files.
There was apparently evidence that he had had a homosexual encounter shortly before he was found, and they didn't want anything like that to get out.
There was a girl Scientologist working in the hospital in a very secure position, and she got all the reports on Quinton and gave them to me, and I handed them over to the Guardian's office.
Quinton was cremated the next day.
Those who knew him suggest that he probably just wanted out of Scientology, but couldn't think of a way to do so without ending his own life.
According to Ed Walters, you don't just leave something like Scientology.
You quit and then instantly become an enemy.
He knew his father violently attacked anyone who betrayed him, and he knew that the Guardian's office would be after him as a traitor.
He had grown up in Scientology and would have been tremendously afraid of the world out there, full of wogs and evil people.
I guess he just couldn't handle it.
Now, L. Ron Hubbard probably would have yielded the same thing if he had left Scientology instead of killing it.
What has he done to me?
Yeah, what has he done to me?
It's one of those things.
It's crazy because like, of course, they have some people in Vegas.
Like, it's like they have this pit boss in Vegas and they have like a lady working at a hospital.
But like, I feel like at this point, you get the feeling that at this point in the church's history, they have people like that in pretty much every city.
Every major city.
Yeah, they've got Scientologists scattered around who they can trust to like, yeah, we need you to get some, pull some medical records for us.
We need you to bug this conversation.
We need you to get this guy wasted or whatever.
That's almost the more baffling part because I can wrap my head around the concept of crazy people doing crazy stuff because they want to be awesome.
Yeah.
But the fact that they convince en masse all these people of different walks of life that are applicable in the way of like, oh, I can get information from them.
Like, that's just, what is that demographic?
Well, consistency.
You got to keep in mind one of the things he's saying at this point in time, this is, you know, the Cold War is pretty ornery in like the late 70s.
This is not that long before Red Dawn comes out.
So fear is high.
Fear is high.
L. Ron Hubbard, one of the ways he's billing Scientology is like, this is the tech, which is like his term for their religious stuff.
This is what's going to save the world.
This is what's going to like make a nuclear war possible.
So all of you are like as like the guardians of this sacred knowledge that I've brought from space.
All of you are like integral in saving the world.
So these people like view themselves as secret agents, you know, for in the cause of the salvation of humanity.
Which if you're just like a pit boss or a lady working in a mid-level position at a hospital and you want some excitement in your life.
It's deserved.
It's cool, right?
Like you get to be a secret spy, bug these evil psychiatrists or whatever.
Also ironic that the only place he didn't befoul with horrendous crimes is space.
Like I think that's the only place he's innocent.
He's totally got the underground.
Oh, he did try to.
He wrote letters to NASA saying that like you're not going to get into space without our help.
That's why I mentioned it is I bet you're bottom butt that this is a guy who genuinely wanted to go to space.
I mean, I used to read his sci-fi books because I read all sci-fi books.
And it was genuine.
He loves space.
He loves him in space.
We're all grateful that he didn't make it there.
No, it didn't need L. Ron Hubbard.
God.
You know what else doesn't need L. Ron Hubbard?
The wonderful products and services that support this show with their advertising dollars.
Why would they?
They're fully actualized.
They're fully actualized.
I've heard about these.
These services?
Yes.
And the products?
Uh-huh.
All right.
Well, let's all hear about them some more.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Warden.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, what did I?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Now, I want to be clear here.
When I quoted Mr. Walters earlier, he said that L. Ron Hubbard's son was scared of a world filled with wogs and evil people.
Now, my Australian listeners will note that the word wog is a racial slur in that country, but it also has a totally separate meaning in Scientology.
So Walters was not being racist against anyone there.
L. Ron Hubbard used the term wogs to refer to normal people who were not members of his sweet-ass space cult.
He defined a wog as, quote, like muggles.
And it sounds like muggle.
Yeah, it is.
And it's, yeah, Hubbard said a wog is, quote, a common everyday garden variety humanoid.
Infiltrating Scientology00:10:25
He is a body.
He doesn't know he's here, etc.
He isn't there as a spirit at all.
He is not operating as a thief.
He's such a special boy.
He's not a special person.
Operating as a thief.
Yeah.
I still don't even, because I thought you were trying to get rid of the thieves.
Well, but you are a thetan too, right?
I think.
So, like, you're not operating.
You don't realize you're a space ghost and try to inside a meat sock.
Yeah.
There's good thetans and there's cheating thetans.
And you're saying they had locations all across the U.S. at this time.
Oh, yeah, they're fucking everywhere, man.
It sounds like there's space ghosts.
Coast to coast.
All right, well, the episode's over.
That joke's all we needed.
See you guys next week.
I'm sorry, we pre-wrote that.
We're all Scientologists.
We talked about it.
We're really selling everyone.
Hey, that wasn't an actor, though.
That's real.
That one was real.
Might have been Tom Cruise.
Probably not.
Definitely not.
Shouldn't be slandering a rich millionaire.
He also runs too fast to ever believably be hit by a car as a pedestrian.
Yeah.
Just wouldn't buy it.
I also think if he came after you wanting to kill you, he'd probably do the job.
Oh, yeah.
I feel like Tom Cruise could very easily have been a special forces guy or a murderer for hire.
I mean, this is the kind of guy that with his fuck off money, he just has like a compound where he learns martial arts.
Yeah, where he learns how to destroy things.
So you were worried about the legal ramifications of slandering him by saying he might have been that guy, but you immediately also want to say he's probably good at murdering.
I mean, I think he would be the first to admit that.
Sure, sure, sure.
Sure.
He would be, hypothetically, a great murderer.
When you talk to guys who like do like train Hollywood actors for gun stuff, the two people they note as being like, these guys don't really need any help is Tom Cruise and Keon.
I know DJ.
Yeah, because the big movies he's been in, where he's had to shoot guns.
And if you see him behind the scenes, he just tries hard.
Yeah, Keanu Reed is trying hard.
Yeah, he's a great guy.
Now, you remember those two Scientology agents who orchestrated the Department of Justice break-in back in 76?
Well, after 11 months on the lamb in early 1977, one of them broke and became an informant to the FBI.
The Bureau had been on his case for the break-in, but the full story of the church's infiltration of the U.S. government was complete news to them.
They opened a massive investigation into Scientology's sweeping infiltration of the United States government.
The investigation would culminate in a June 1977 raid that is still one of the largest raids in the history of the FBI.
134 agents with crowbars and sledgehammers tore through Scientology HQ in D.C., as well as their offices in Los Angeles.
They carted away tens of thousands of documents, including the plans for Project Normandy, revealing the church's secret goal to establish area control in the city of Clearwater.
The resulting court case led to 11 Scientologists, including L. Ron Hubbard's wife, Mary Sue, being convicted and sentenced to up to five years in federal prison.
L. Ron Hubbard was named by the grand jury as an unindicted co-conspirator, a term we all know very well now, but the seized files did not link him directly to any crimes.
He maintained his innocence up until the very end.
According to the Justice Department, quote, the crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard of.
No business, office, desk, or file was safe from their snooping and prying.
No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds.
The tools of their trade were miniature transmitters, lockpicks, secret codes, forged credentials, and any other device they found necessary to carry out their conspiratorial schemes.
By the way, it's worth noting that while this is happening at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet government never managed to infiltrate the United States in nearly as comprehensive or extensive a fashion as the Church of Scientology did.
It seems like they should have been trying to infiltrate the Church of Scientology.
Let's like talk to the people who really are making progress.
Yeah, they fucking.
Now, those are the facts of the case as they exist in reality, but they are not the facts of the cases admitted by the Church of Scientology.
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, they accused the FBI of Gestapo-like brutality, which would be true if the Gestapo handed out five-year sentences for massive and sweeping infiltrations of the Third Reich rather than just shooting people.
They had crowbars.
They have frightened me.
The Stand League builds itself as an advocacy group of Scientologists fighting bigotry against their religion.
The name is an acronym for Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination.
You have to use the in and against for the acronym, which isn't really a great acronym for CETA.
We all cut corners now and again.
I use expired throwing bagels.
Like, nobody's perfect.
I found an article published on the Stand League's website about the Snow White program.
Here's how they describe it.
The Snow White program refers to the program written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1973 for the purpose of legally correcting and expunging the plethora of false government reports about the Church of Scientology, its leaders, and members through strictly legal means.
It's a big tip out of legal twice.
P.S. Legal.
P.S. Legal.
P.S. League.
Think about the word legal and think of me.
Yeah, the Stand League asserts that L. Ron Hubbard did not remotely contemplate anything illegal.
Of course not.
Famous law follower L. Ron Hubbard.
Who's got two thumbs and is legal?
This guy.
This guy.
I got to get back on my boat now.
I'm going to kidnap my baby again.
No collusion.
Oh, my wife, though.
Damn, it sucks how she sucks.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's rough.
Now, it is impossible to disprove that to a point of certainty, which is why L. Ron Hubbard himself was never convicted of anything.
But I want to emphasize this.
Come the fuck on.
We all know all of this is known information.
It's true.
Now, we're not done with the story of L. Ron Hubbard yet.
And in our next episode, which I'm very excited for, we're going to talk about the last phase of his life, where he became an auteur filmmaker and a singer.
Hell yes.
Hell yes.
Can you believe LRH has this much gas left in the tank?
And it does it even involve Battlefield Earth?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, buddy.
It does it involve Battlefield Earth.
Yeah.
Yeah, what a juicy treat at the end of it.
So many people come on the show and at some point in the hour go, yeah, this has been really depressing.
Thanks for having me.
I feel like you got all the sad stuff out of the way.
I mean, there's been sad shit, but man, the next one's going to be a treat.
It is going to be a treat.
But before we close this episode out, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the town of Clearwater, Florida.
Now, the Fort Harrison Hotel was renamed by the Church of Scientology to Flagland Base after renovations were finished.
It became, and is today, the chief training center for Scientologists studying the highest levels of whatever the hell Scientology is.
Since 1980, three Scientologists have died at Flag Base.
One of those dead was a young woman named Lisa McPherson, who died of a blood clot caused by dehydration and bedrest after 17 days locked in room 174 of the former hotel.
Josephus Havenath was found dead in a bathtub in his room.
The water was hot enough to have burned his skin off.
The official cause of death was drowning, but the coroner noted that he was found with his head above the waterline.
Herbert Pfaff died of a seizure in the hotel after he ceased taking his seizure medication in favor of a Scientology-approved vitamin program.
And this is the Hotel from the Shining you're describing?
Yeah, that's the essential what they turned this building into.
Don't go in room 174.
Don't.
In 1997 alone, the Clearwater Police received 160 emergency calls from Flag Base.
At no point were they allowed to enter.
For most of Scientology history, the church was in constant arrears for failure to pay state and local property taxes.
Scientology was brought to court numerous times by the city and the IRS for this.
Luckily for the church, they eventually succeeded in having Scientology declared a religion, which granted them tax-exempt status.
The way they did this was pretty fascinating.
They basically bombarded the IRS as an organization and individual IRS executives with lawsuits until they got their way.
We'll probably talk about that in the tale in a later episode.
According to a recent report in the Tampa Bay Times, the Church of Scientology currently owns more than $260 million in property in downtown Clearwater.
Most of these buildings are empty and undeveloped, and many in Clearwater blame the church for the fact that downtown Clearwater has remained incredibly underdeveloped compared to downtown St. Petersburg and Tampa.
The church is able to exercise a huge amount of control over the city of Clearwater due to their ownership of much of its downtown area and then economic power of their religion.
According to FSU News, quote, Scientology leader David Miscavige introduced a retail strategy to Clearwater's Community Redevelopment Agency.
The plan requires use of not just property owned by the church, but it also every property in a three-block by four-block area that encompasses all of downtown.
The plan involves attracting a few major retail brands and then filling open spaces with hand-picked businesses similar to an outdoor mall.
The proposal will give the church total control over the downtown area in regards to development and management of properties.
The church's redevelopment plan has not yet been made public, nor will it be subject to a vote.
Cool.
Why do you need that?
Like, why?
I don't understand what the area.
He's like, this church is important to me.
I made trillions of dollars, but I need area control.
What's area control?
Well, I want to decide if there's a Sparrows or you know an old spaghetti factory there.
Well, and this is what I want it to be.
Who gives a shit, dude?
This is the decision of his predecessor because for L. Ron Hubbard taking over this town, which the church controls like 40 years later today, this was like a two-week project for him.
Right.
Like, he was there for like a month or so.
L. Ron Hubbard himself never spent more than a couple of days actually inside the city limits of Clearwater.
Like, they still control this, and it was just sort of a vague plan of his for a couple of weeks before he moved up to Georgetown and career.
That's I like it.
Take it with these mythic figures.
Yeah, like the entire Sea Org is just like, whatever he said, what beautiful drippings came out of his horrible mom.
We need to make that our religion because there's only so much that he said.
I mean, he said a lot, but it's like there's still people in Clearwater who have to deal with the consequences of L. Ron Hubbard's passing fancy every day.
Well, I guess we have to justify this shit.
I also kind of want to go there now because I didn't know there existed like a company town for Scientology.
Yeah, there sure does.
I got to imagine because they're freaking annoying to be around.
They must have pushed out anyone who had an easy opportunity to leave or felt like, so by now, 40 years later, I just want to go to a town where you're like 90% certain everyone around you is a Scientologist at all times.
Or another person gawking at all the Scientologists.
Company Town Exists00:07:41
I wonder if there's ever at the time like he would listen to music or was really into stand-up comedian and would like watch it and stuff.
And then everyone was like, I guess that's another god amongst us.
You get the feeling from L. Ron Hubbard that he did not consume a lot of other people's media.
Right.
That's probably true.
Yeah.
We will be talking about Star Wars a little bit in the next episode.
I can't wait.
This is going to be.
It is going to be great.
But first, you know what else is going to be great?
What?
Is y'all plug in your pluggables?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we're in the P-Zone.
Welcome to the Bazon.
I thought that's the Pizza Zone.
What's the cookie without that?
That's a pazookie.
The BJs.
The P-Zone.
And we'll blast you with a Pizuzooka full of pazookies.
All right, guys.
We have things we do.
Throwing bagels around the table.
Oh, shit.
Oh, man.
Oh, God.
You're under the bagels now.
My associate Abe here and I have a little outfit called Small Beans.
It's a podcasting network and is about to branch into web video.
And I think it's very important that you find out more about that at patreon.com/slash smallbeans or on the Small Beans YouTube channel because we're right now in the process of producing a little show where four friends sit around analyzing pop culture accompanied by illustrations and clip packages.
And there's a good chance that a lot of your audience likes that show because it feels familiar to them and exciting.
This sounds familiar to another show that I know you were on in the past.
It's unlike any other show.
Well, this is the launch of a legally distinct show from all other shows.
I love legally distinct called Off hours.
Off hours.
What you doing your off hours?
The analyze pop culture.
Go analyze pop culture.
Hey, this is Robert Evans cutting in from the future.
When we recorded this episode, off hours was not yet done.
It was just a dream in Michael and Abe's beautiful, beautiful eyes.
But now it is, in fact, a reality.
And you can watch it right now on the internet if you go to YouTube and look up Off Hours.
If your life got rebooted, what kind would it be on the Small Beans channel?
Please check it out.
Off hours.
If your life got rebooted, what kind would it be?
It's a fun show.
It's important to me because all of my friends are involved and because internet comedy, if you don't know, is having some hard times these days.
And Michael and Abe and a good group of many of my former co-workers who are all great people are trying to keep it alive, keep it user supported, avoid having to do ads, avoid a lot of that mess, and try to make beautiful content that makes people laugh and makes the world more bearable.
So please go to the Small Beans channel on YouTube, check out the first episode of Off Hours, share it with your friends, donate to Small Beans, and keep the world laughing.
That's all I do in the world.
Or you research horror.
The reason we chose that name is because the acronym is O. Like, oh, I might want to watch this.
MNF.
Fun, fun, friends.
Fun with friends.
Oh, fun with friends.
Oh, fun with friends.
And it's, you know, after your work hours.
It's like after hours would have worked too.
Yeah, you would watch it after hours.
It's the kind of thing I would watch when I put down my throwing bagels for the day and I pick up my relaxing bagels.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just unwind with the soothing dulcet tones.
I am pitching a Frasier episode that I think will convince you to throw a bagel or two at the screen.
Okay.
Yeah, he might be bad.
Yeah, Frasier might be bad, guys.
So many surprises like that and more at patreon.com/slash small beans.
Small beans.
All right.
I'm Robert Evans.
You can buy a shirt, T-Public, behind the bastards.
You can buy shirts.
You can buy shirts now.
You can also just buy shirts in other places if you want a shirt.
It's legally required in many outdoor areas in the United States because of the fucking president.
Or you can listen to my other podcast.
It could happen here.
If you want to be sad, it will make your day worse with knowledge.
Listen to it.
And I have a Twitter and an Instagram at BastardsPod.
Well, Sophie runs both of those.
I don't understand Instagram.
It frightens and confuses me.
But you can look at those things.
They exist.
They're in the world.
We have a website behindthebastards.com where you can find all the sources for this, including Barefaced Messiah, which you can find free online.
I think it's out of copyright.
I don't know.
I did buy a copy of it, but you can also find it for free online.
Just want to do it.
There's a chance the church got a little of your money.
Well, no, they didn't publish that book.
They do not like that book.
They hate the book.
It's a hell of a read, though.
Speaking of cutting room floors, as we were earlier, the number of LRH stories that I didn't include in this podcast just because I couldn't make a 14-hour podcast without L. Ron Hubbard.
Fucking wild.
Anyway, I'm going to throw some bagels.
Y'all continue your commute or your poop.
Yeah!
Number five.
The episode's over.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night.
Each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.