Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (32 page)

Miscavige was also well schooled in intrigue. Although he was still quite a young man, he had been running operations for Hubbard for
several years, with brutal efficiency. In order to eliminate Hubbard’s designated successors, however, Miscavige needed a lieutenant with similar qualities of remorselessness and total commitment.

MARK RATHBUN
CAME FROM
a distinguished but deeply troubled family. His father was a graduate of the US Naval Academy. His artistic mother was the daughter of
Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who created some of the most enduring images in American commercial history—Aunt Jemima, the Quaker Oats man, and the famous Santa Claus drinking a Coca-Cola beside the Christmas tree. The Rathbun family lived in Marin County, a Bohemian enclave just north of San Francisco. When Mark was a young child, his mother had a series of nervous breakdowns. On five or six occasions she received what was the standard treatment of the day,
electroshock therapy. In September 1962, when Mark was five, his mother’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Her car was parked on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Mark turned into a restless young man. He went to college to study creative writing but dropped out in order to experience the real world. In 1976 he was living in a camp of migrant workers, hoping to become the next Jack London, when he learned that his brother
Bruce had become catatonic and had been committed to a state hospital in Oregon.

Mark hitchhiked to Portland to oversee Bruce’s care. He carried around a backpack full of books on Buddhism and the works of
Jiddu Krishnamurti. Although it is easy to see in hindsight that the nineteen-year-old Mark Rathbun was primed, because of his troubled background and questing philosophy, to become a part of the Church of Scientology, it wasn’t clear to him at the time. His current spiritual mentor, Krishnamurti, preached against the idea of messiahs, but he also stated that every individual has the responsibility for discovering the causes of his own limitations in order to attain universal spiritual and psychological freedom. That resonated with Hubbard’s aim of “clearing the planet.”

Psychotherapy had evolved somewhat from the indignities that had been inflicted on their mother; it had moved into pharmacology. But drugs didn’t seem to offer a solution to Bruce’s problems; in Mark’s opinion, his brother was just being warehoused, held in a chemical straitjacket. Rathbun got a job as a short-order cook at Dave’s Deli,
and each day, when he went to the bus stop in downtown Portland on his way to the hospital, he would pass the Scientology mission on Salmon Street. He would banter with the Scientology recruiters and soon got to know them by name. One day, he told a recruiter, “I’ve got ten minutes. Why don’t you give me your best shot?” The Scientologist started pitching the Hubbard communications course, which at the time cost fifty dollars. It immediately appealed to Rathbun. “The problem is, I’ve only got twenty-five bucks to my entire name,” he said. The recruiter let him take the course, and threw in a copy of
Dianetics
as well.

In that first course, Rathbun went exterior. It was completely real to him. All the Eastern philosophy he had absorbed had been leading to this moment. He finally realized that he was separate from his body. Hadn’t this been the point of the Buddha’s teachings—to isolate the spirit and end the repetitive cycle of life and death? From that moment on, Rathbun never looked back. He was transformed.

Another recruiter persuaded Rathbun that he would be better able to deal with his brother’s problems if he had more training, which he could afford if he joined the
Sea Org. Rathbun signed the billion-year contract in January 1978.
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A few months later, Rathbun was sent to work in LA. One night, he was assigned to escort
Diane Colletto, the twenty-five-year-old editor of Scientology’s
Auditor
magazine, from the publications building to the Scientology complex in Hollywood where they both lived. It was late at night on August 19, 1978. Diane was a petite and mousy intellectual, with thick glasses. A diligent worker, she was often the last to leave the office. On this night, she was frightened.

Diane’s husband,
John Colletto, a highly trained auditor, had recently been declared a Suppressive Person. John had gotten into an argument with church officials over a matter of policy. After being declared, he went to visit a Scientology chaplain, who could see that he was having a breakdown. He kept crying and grabbing his head in despair. At that point, he was forcibly detained in the RPF. He spent
several weeks there, but managed to escape. Diane was ordered to disconnect from him. She told the chaplain
that John had threatened her, saying that if he couldn’t have Scientology, then neither could she.

Rathbun—a big man, a former college basketball player—knew nothing of this as he rode back to the berthing with Diane in her Fiat. She was uncommunicative. She drove north on Rampart Boulevard, where the Pubs Org was located, to Sunset, and then left on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was mid-August, but there was a breeze from the ocean and the night air was unseasonably cool. As soon as Diane turned the corner from North Edgemont Street onto Fountain Avenue, in front of the Scientology complex, a pair of headlights on high beam blinded them, then a car rammed into them, pinning Diane’s vehicle against the curb.

Rathbun was in shock, but he managed to get out of the passenger side of the car. They had come to a stop in front of a small house with a picket fence. He saw the man in the other car get out and run toward Diane, who was still in the driver’s seat. Rathbun came around the front of the car, just in time to hear a popping noise and the sound of glass shattering. It was the first time in his life he had ever heard a gunshot.
Jesse Prince, who was in RPF on the seventh floor, heard the sound and rushed to the windows. People were shouting, “John Colletto!
” Everyone knew immediately what was happening.

Rathbun grabbed Colletto, and they spun around in the street. He got Colletto in a headlock, but Colletto pistol-whipped him and Rathbun momentarily lost consciousness. Both of them tumbled to the ground.

When Rathbun recovered, he saw Diane on all fours, crawling on the sidewalk, and Colletto running toward her with the gun. Rathbun says he got up and tackled John. They crashed through the picket fence and wrestled on the lawn. More shots were fired. At one point, according to Rathbun, the barrel of the revolver was pressed against the nape of his neck and Colletto pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t fire, but Rathbun went exterior, viewing the scene from twelve feet above his body.

Colletto broke free and caught up to his wife. He stuck the gun in her ear. Rathbun says he saw what was happening and did a “flying sidekick,” but at that fatal moment the gun fired.

Colletto was knocked to the ground by Rathbun’s blow and the
gun skittered across the pavement. Rathbun picked it up and tried to fire it at Colletto, but the chambers were all empty. Colletto got in his car and screeched away.

Rathbun went back to Diane. Blood was gurgling and spewing from her mouth. He thought she was drowning in her own blood. Rathbun took off his shirt and put it under her head. As he heard the sirens screaming, she died in his arms.
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Three days later, John
Colletto’s decomposing body was found. He had slashed his wrists and bled to death on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway.

Because of this incident, Rathbun was singled out for his fearlessness, or what Scientology terms his “high level of confront.” Soon after that, he was sent to
La Quinta, Hubbard’s winter headquarters, where the old man was just then building up his moviemaking enterprise. Miscavige had appointed Rathbun head of what was known as the
“All Clear” unit. The object was to resolve the dozens of
lawsuits around the country that had named Hubbard as a defendant. He was also the target of grand juries in Tampa, New York, and Washington, DC. Hubbard wanted to be able to return to his moviemaking full-time, but he was afraid to show himself until he was assured that he wouldn’t be hauled into court. (He died before that happened.)

Like many
Sea Org members on the secret base, Rathbun adopted an alias for security reasons, one that was similar to his real name but that separated him from his previous identity; it also made it more difficult for anyone to find him. Mark became Marty.

AS THE NEW CHURCH LEADER
,
Pat Broeker quickly sought to exert his influence. He had a special uniform
made up for himself, with solid gold epaulettes, and a “Loyal Officer” flag that was to be flown wherever he was in residence. He announced that he was going to issue a new
“Grade Chart” on
Sea Org Day in Clearwater. He justified the alteration
of
Hubbard’s sacred material with his own divinations because he claimed to be in telepathic communication with the founder. His Sea Org Day speech was stymied, however, when he was told that church authorities expected that a government raid would take place if he showed himself in public. That wasn’t true, but it wasn’t out of the question. For several years, the leaders of the church, including Hubbard, Miscavige, and
Broeker, had been targets of an
IRS criminal investigation
. Church lawyers persuaded Broeker that while the investigation was still ongoing he should confine himself to another ranch near Creston that Hubbard had purchased. Broeker was content with that arrangement. He seemed more at home with the quarter horses that he so lovingly purchased with the church’s money than he did with the bureaucrats in the church hierarchy. He continued shopping for exemplary breeding stock even after Hubbard’s death, claiming he was carrying out the founder’s vision. He seemed to think he could run the church from the sidelines.

Other than Hubbard’s imprimatur, Broeker had few assets on his side. He had the unfortunate combination of being garrulous without being articulate. Many of the executives he had been close to had been forced out of the church or had fled. Even people who didn’t like him, however, were fond of Annie. She was in many ways her husband’s opposite. She was measured where he was goofy and impetuous. Sweet and shy, with a fragile beauty that some compared to the actress Jessica Lange, Annie had been born into Scientology and was one of the few original Messengers who hadn’t been purged. In 1982, Hubbard had made her Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, the highest post in the church bureaucracy, in charge of protecting the sanctity of Scientology’s spiritual technology. It was a job she was ill suited for, by nature and also by circumstance, as she was not an auditor, and for years she had been living at the remote ranch as Hubbard’s caretaker, away from the administration of church affairs. In March 1987, Miscavige seized control of the RTC, making himself the Chairman of the Board. He downgraded the Inspector General’s post by dividing it into three parts. His
new lieutenant and henchman,
Marty Rathbun, became the IG for Ethics.

Still, both Pat and Annie remained untouchable because of Hubbard’s final decree. And, most tantalizingly, only Pat seemed to know where the new OT levels—which he now claimed went all the way up to XV—were hidden. They were his insurance. Nothing could be more
precious in the world of Scientology—to its members, who sought to gain Hubbard’s final revelations on the Bridge to Total Freedom, and to the organization, which profited from that journey.

At Miscavige’s direction, Rathbun hired a team of private investigators to follow Broeker and dig into his private life. One of them was a former cop
who met Broeker at a gun show, then began frequenting Broeker’s favorite tavern. He would chat him up whenever he came in. They got to be so friendly that at Christmas the ex-cop gave Broeker a cordless phone. Because such phones emit a weak radio signal, Rathbun’s minions were able to record Broeker’s calls. The detectives followed him everywhere, but there was no clue as to where the secret OT levels might be hidden.

Miscavige still worried that Broeker was holding vital material back. A few months later, he and church attorneys went to the ranch to persuade the Broekers to hand over whatever confidential materials they might have to the church for safekeeping. While this was going on, a gang of a dozen powerful men assembled by Rathbun surrounded the ranch quarters and hid in the bushes.

Inside the ranch house, Miscavige and the lawyers argued that Scientology would never get its tax exemption if the church did not have in its possession its most important documents. Miscavige also threatened Broeker with the prospect of criminal prosecution. Rathbun had discovered that there was $1.8 million of Hubbard’s funds that Broeker couldn’t account for. Broeker appeared to cave in. He let Rathbun load the file cabinets in the ranch house into a truck. Had Broeker not agreed, Rathbun was prepared to signal his goon squad to storm the place and seize everything. It took months to sort through the voluminous files, only to find that there was really nothing there—certainly, nothing that resembled new OT levels.

In November 1987, the IRS notified the church that its criminal investigation had concluded. No charges were filed, but that also reduced the leverage Miscavige had over Broeker. A few months later, Miscavige decided that a final operation to retrieve the missing OT levels was in order. This time there would be no subterfuge, no subtle argument. Rathbun brought along a team of armed private investigators and off-duty LA cops as muscle, along with several other church executives. One of them found fifty thousand dollars stashed under the kitchen sink.

Miscavige concentrated his attention on Annie. He took her to a
separate room and interrogated her as a detective barred the door, preventing her husband from seeing her. Eventually, Annie admitted that Pat kept a storage locker in nearby Paso Robles, and she coughed up the key. Rathbun’s team found more files, but not what they wanted. Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced.
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