Empire of the Odd

A previously unpublished saga of an $8 million check
by Tony Ortega
June 30th, 2008 8:00 AM

Six years ago, when I was a reporter at New Times LA, I’d written several stories about Scientology (Los Angeles is one of its headquarters), and I was about to uncork the longest one yet—a 7,000 word piece about an embarrassing, $8 million defeat Scientology had just suffered, when the weekly paper suddenly folded.

That unpublished story has been sitting in storage ever since. Fast forward to 2008, and the world of reporting on Scientology has changed radically, thanks in part to the lunacy of Tom Cruise, but also in part to a worldwide, leaderless movement that calls itself Anonymous. Ravenous for any information about L. Ron Hubbard’s strange organization, Anonymous scours the world for the least tidbit about Scientology.

Well, here was a pretty meaty morsel just sitting in my hard drive. It’s still a substantial bit of reporting, and it fills in some gaps in the historical record of one of the most humiliating court losses Scientology has ever suffered.

Originally scheduled to be printed in October 2002, the piece follows. (It’s unchanged except for updates in [brackets].) This material may come as a revelation to some readers, but even for the know-it-alls at Anonymous, there are juicy bites. —Tony Ortega

[[[[Much Moer!]]]] 

BY BRUCE LIVESEY

JUNE 23, 2008

The first time I met Gerry Armstrong, I thought he was paranoid. I’d driven down from Vancouver, summer 2007, into the verdant Fraser Valley to Chilliwack, BC, a somnolent, wind-blown town surrounded by jagged mountain ranges. A place as far removed from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Scientology’s loopiness as one can possibly get. Armstrong and his third wife Caroline live in a walk-up, one-bedroom apartment above a tiny strip mall that’s seen better days.

When I arrived, Armstrong suggested we drive to a nearby park, rather than talk in their apartment. It was a beautiful July day and, except for a couple of stoners milling about out of earshot, the three of us were alone on the manicured grass beside a pond. Now sixty-one, Armstrong is an alarmingly small man, with elfin features, a beaky nose, sallow skin and large limpid blue eyes. The baseball cap he wore to ward off the hot sun made him look even more vulnerable. Amiable, soft-spoken with no trace of aggression, he chose his words with deliberation. Caroline seemed protective of him.

Armstrong’s wariness toward me stemmed from his concern that I might very well be a Scientologist on a spying expedition. This has happened before. Four years ago, a middle-aged man showed up in Chilliwack, rented a storefront across the street from their apartment and tried to ingratiate himself into their lives. He was there for a year and a half before Armstrong and his wife finally figured out that he’d been sent by the Church of Scientology to keep an eye on them. When they confronted him, he said “You turned the tables on me,” and bolted. “And in the middle of the night he disappeared from the office space,” Armstrong told me.

Armstrong finally began to tell me fragments of stories about being relentlessly harassed by the church, pursued by its private investigators, run off the road, targeted in elaborate sting operations, slandered at every turn by what he calls “Black PR” and “dead agent packages” and stalked through the US courts. In fact, since last fall, a California court order has been reinstated, demanding that he be remanded to a state jail and pay Scientology $500,000 US for breaking a confidentiality agreement he signed with the church twenty- one years ago. Hence his exile in Chilliwack.

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The Church of Scientology, notoriously ruthless at crushing its critics, may have met its match.The Times joins a demo by ‘Anonymous’ – the vanguard of a new internet-fuelled radicalism

There were signs, if you knew where to look, that the launch of Operation Sea Arrrgh was imminent. In a hundred corners of the internet plots were being plotted; in fancydress shops sales of Guy Fawkes masks were rising and in thousands of dank teenage bedrooms young men and women were making plans to converge on sites around the world, dressed as pirates.

Their target was the Church of Scientology – and this was an altogether new way of protesting. It was all so different from how it used to be. For more than a decade, a small group had gathered opposite the Church’s London offices to stage lonely demonstrations. Some were former Scientologists, some just angered by an organisation that they claimed split up families, extorted money and employed its followers as slave labour. Leafleting passers-by, explaining themselves to the police and countering – they claimed – the harassment of the Scientologists, they were happy if a dozen turned out.

[[[moer-moer!]]] 

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > SCITECH A scrappy Web site that’s built a reputation for taking on Goliath-sized corporate and government corruption is now fighting a holy war over copyright infringement.

Wikileaks.org — a watchdog Web site that leaks corporate and government documents — hasn’t officially launched, yet it has already uncovered human-rights violations in China, claimed to have swayed Kenya’s Dec. 2007 elections and exposed the inner workings of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

So many were surprised when it recently turned its sights on two lawyer-heavy religious groups: the Mormons and the Scientologists.

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 (Mental Floss) — Maybe it’s all the news of “Anonymous” protests against Scientology that have been dominating the blogs lately, but it seems the word “cult” is on a lot of people’s minds. Which makes me think about just how many cults there are out there — and not just the religious kind, either.
5 cults we’re OK with

Merriam-Webster has not one but five definitions for “cult,” the most expansive of which is “a great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work … usually by a small group of people.” We’re gonna take that pony and run with it.

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This was found on one of the secret Anonymus meeting sites. 

The Psychs are controlled by the evil Marcabians. (which we all know is a completely sane assumption, I mean c’mon it is so obvious)

The Psychs control the pharmaceutical companies.
The evil psych controlled pharmaceutical companies are using brainwashing procedures from a book by Beria, to control/influence the young people into doing drugs and watching porn.
The porn-crazed apathetic drugged out youth of today are getting paid to protest the one hope for mankind by the evil psych controlled pharmaceutical companies.
Have I missed anything? Am I getting this right?

June 13, 2008

Yarrrr! Those Anonymous guys we reported on a while ago are still going strong in their campaign to expose the dodgy practices and nasty tactics of the “Church” of Scientology, and they’re planning to make June as enturbulated as possible for the Xenu-believers, with this Saturday’s pirate-themed protest outside two of the “Church”‘s London sites, codenamed Operation Sea Arrrgh!.The London ‘chapter’ of Anonymous was greatly heartened by the City of London Police’s recent high-profile issuing of a court summons – and equally high-profile retraction of said summons – to a protester who uses the alias EpicNoseGuy (see this BBC News report for more). Turnout numbers for Sea Arrrgh are consequently expected to be high; following the cult sign fiasco (EpicNoseGuy’s sign, lest we forget, contained a direct quote from Mr Justice Latey calling Scientology a “dangerous cult” in a High Court ruling) we confidently predict that signs featuring the four-letter c-word will be much in evidence. We’ve also heard rumors of a very special feline-themed pirate ship, currently under construction.

But if you’re thinking of buying a standard-issue V mask for the protest from the usual supplier – Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue – beware: a poster on Wirah reported that staff at the sci-fi store had told him that suspected Scientologists had recently been in and bought the entire stock of the masks, and had asked shop assistants to take photos of anyone who came in trying to buy one. Will they ever learn?

Operation Sea Arrrgh!: 11am at Blackfriars station, moving to Goodge Street at 2pm

A ‘lesson learned’ when group was ‘not as forthcoming as they needed to be,’ principal says

Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun

Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008

A Vancouver principal said his school was uninformed when it invited a group affiliated with the Church of Scientology to speak to a student assembly last month about human rights.

John Bevacqua, of St. Patrick regional secondary school, said he hadn’t been aware that Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) is part of the Scientology movement until it was brought to his attention by a staff member shortly after the group finished its presentation.

“It was very unfortunate that they were not as forthcoming as they needed to be,” he said of YHRI. “It was a lesson learned.” The group was invited into the school on the recommendation of students who had heard representatives speak at a conference and were impressed with the message. The students gained the support of teacher sponsors, who vouched for the group and extended the invitation, Bevacqua said.

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Six weeks after public health authorities on the Caribbean island of Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) impounded the Scientology cult’s 440-foot luxury liner “Freewinds,” the ship remains locked down. Experts advise that decontaminating the ship would cost millions of dollars and may not even be possible. Meanwhile, the cult continues to solicit funds for cruises that will not happen.

After the ship was quarantined on April 26, the Curaçao Drydock Company was contracted to carry out refurbishment and repairs. The contamination was so extensive that the company decided that the risk to its workers was too great, and ceased operations. At that point Scientology sent a team of its “Sea Org” internal paramilitary force to clean the ship themselves. They are bringing the blue asbestos by the truckload to dump at the island’s Selikor landfill site at Malpais.

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