Even if he had had access to a phone, Hawkins wouldn’t have called the police. If a Sea Org member were to seek outside help, he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor for months or years. Far more important, Hawkins believed, was the fact that his spiritual immortality was on the line. Scientology had made him aware of his eternal nature as he moved from life to life, erasing his fear of mortality. Without that, he would be doomed to dying over and over again, “in ignorance and darkness,” he said, “never knowing my true nature as a spirit.” Miscavige, he concluded, “holds the power of eternal life and death over you.”
The church provided an affidavit of a former Sea Org member, Yael Lustgarten, who stated that she was present at the meeting and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentation—“He smelled of body odor, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low and he could hardly be heard”—and he was merely instructed to shape up. On the other hand, Amy Scobee said she witnessed the attack—it was her cubicle the two men fell into—and after the altercation, she recalled, “I gathered all the buttons from Jeff’s shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him.”
Tommy Davis later testified that he had conducted an investigation of the charges of abuse at the base. He said that all of the abuse had been committed by Rinder, Rathbun, and De Vocht—none by Miscavige.
TOM DE VOCHT GREW UP in a little central Florida town called Fort Meade. When he was ten years old, in 1974, his cousin, Dicky Thompson, a keyboardist in the Steve Miller Band, came to visit, riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. That year the band had a number one song, “The Joker,” and Thompson rode into town with a glow of fame around him. “He had a weird stare,” De Vocht remembered. “He invited my sister to meet Steve Miller and John Travolta.” Within a year, most of De Vocht’s family had joined the Church of Scientology. In July 1977, thirteen-year-old Tom De Vocht signed the billion-year contract for the Sea Org.
De Vocht became one of Miscavige’s allies and moved up the bureaucratic ladder quickly. In 1986, he was appointed the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org at Flag. In 2001, Miscavige called him, complaining, “Tom, I can’t get my building done.” The new headquarters for the Religious Technology Center at Gold Base, Building 50, was years behind schedule and well over budget. Miscavige directed De Vocht to come to Gold Base and oversee the construction. The first day he got there, De Vocht realized that “this building is going to be the end of me.”
Forty-seven million dollars—more than a thousand dollars per square foot—had previously been spent on the new center. The building had already been completed a couple of times, using the highest-grade materials—cold rolled steel, and anigre, a beautiful but extremely hard, pinkish African wood—only to have components ripped out because they didn’t meet Miscavige’s standards. Miscavige’s desk, also made of steel, was so heavy that De Vocht worried whether the structure would support it. He discovered that there were no actual architectural drawings for the building; there were only renderings of what it should look like. The stucco exterior walls were already cracked because the whole edifice was at a 1.25-inch tilt. The walls weren’t actually connected to the floors. Even a minor earthquake (Gold Base was just west of the San Andreas Fault) might cause the whole building to collapse. De Vocht recommended that the building be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, but Miscavige rejected that idea.
The expense of essentially rebuilding a poorly constructed building from the inside was immense. When De Vocht had almost finished construction, having spent an additional $60 million, Miscavige still had a list of complaints. He was also critical of the landscaping. Gold Base is in a desert, but Miscavige demanded that the building appear to be set in a forest.
One morning, De Vocht says, Miscavige and his wife were inspecting the large vault in the legal department of Building 50, when the leader stopped in his tracks and began rubbing his head. He turned pale. “Where did we put the gold bullion?” he asked his wife. For a full minute, Miscavige kept rubbing his head and asking about the gold, but then he snapped out of it and went on as if nothing had happened. De Vocht recalls that forty-five minutes later, Shelly Miscavige called him and asked him, “What are we going to do? He’s losing it.” She told him that Dave had gone “Type 3”—psychotic—because of all the Suppressive Persons at the base.3