Hubbard soon decided that the Newport Beach location was compromised, so the three of them hit the road. Pat drove a Chevrolet pickup with a forty-foot Country Aire trailer, which mainly contained Hubbard’s wardrobe, and Annie piloted a luxurious Blue Bird mobile home that John Brousseau had purchased for $120,000 in cash under a false name. The Blue Bird towed a Nissan pickup that Brousseau had converted into a mobile kitchen. For most of a year, this cumbersome caravan roamed the Sierras, lighting in parks along the way. At one point, Hubbard bought a small ranch with a gold mine, but he didn’t really settle down until 1983, on a horse farm in Creston, California, population 270, outside San Luis Obispo, near a spread owned by the country singer Kenny Rogers. He grew a beard and called himself “Jack Farnsworth.”
Hubbard had been used to receiving regular shipments of money, but after he took flight, the entire structure of the church was reorganized, making such under-the-table transfers more difficult to disguise. Miscavige ordered that $1 million a week be transferred to the founder, but now it had to be done in a nominally legal manner. One scheme was to commission screenplays based on Hubbard’s innumerable movie ideas. That way, Hubbard could be paid for the “treatment”—about $100,000 for each idea. Fifty such treatments were prepared. Paul Haggis was one of the writers asked to participate. He received a message from the old man asking him to write a script called “Influencing the Planet.” The script was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbard’s efforts to improve civilization. Haggis co-wrote the script with another Scientologist, Steve Johnstone. “What they wanted was really quite dreadful,” Haggis admitted. Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but apparently the film was never made.
Meanwhile, Miscavige consolidated his position in the church as the essential conduit to the founder. Miscavige’s title was head of Special Project Ops, a mysterious post, and he reported only to Pat Broeker. Miscavige was twenty-three years old at the time and Broeker a decade older. As gatekeepers, they determined what information reached Hubbard’s ears. Under their regency, some of Hubbard’s most senior executives were booted out—people who might have been considered competitors to Miscavige and Broeker in the future management of the church—and replaced by much younger counterparts.
Miscavige and Broeker would communicate in code on their pagers. At any hour of the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere. The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes for hours.
Gale Irwin, who had been on the Apollo when she was sixteen years old and had risen to being the head of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly paranoid, and his only line of communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men. Nearly every one of the original Messengers who had joined Hubbard on the Apollo had been purged. David Mayo, who was Hubbard’s personal auditor, had also been shut off from contact. He, too, became suspicious of Miscavige and ordered him to be security-checked, but Miscavige refused this direct order from a superior. Gale Irwin says she confronted him, and Miscavige knocked her to the ground with a flying tackle. (The church denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.)
Brousseau got a call from Irwin. She was agitated. She told him that Miscavige had gone psychotic. She said she had to contact Pat Broeker right away for a meeting. When Brousseau asked to talk to Miscavige, Irwin began shouting orders at him, saying that Miscavige was raving and had to be restrained. In no way could Brousseau talk to him! He must arrange the meeting with Broeker immediately!
Brousseau drove her to a prearranged pay phone outside a Denny’s restaurant in San Bernardino, which was used only for emergencies. As they waited for the call from Broeker’s driver, a black Dodge van came barreling into the parking lot and slammed to a halt between Brousseau’s car and the phone booth. The doors blew open and half a dozen men spilled out of the van, including David Miscavige. Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable. Miscavige ordered Irwin into the van, and she meekly acquiesced.