Part 7 (1/2)
In 1985, Lisa, eager to ”expand and make more money to go up the Bridge,” as she put it, quit her job at the phone company and went to work for the Slaughters as a loan officer at Atlantic Financial. There is a certain type of personality that flourishes in sales, and Lisa, charming and well mannered, ”aggressive without being obnoxious,” as one co-worker put it, possessed it in spades. Soon she was making roughly $70,000 per year.
Lisa had remarried; her husband, Gene Skonetski, was a Scientologist she'd met at the mission. Now they began to acquire the trappings of wealth: a new condo, new furniture, new clothes, a diamond necklace, a new Porsche, a $700 vacuum cleaner. Virtually everything was bought with Lisa's salary, as Gene worked full-time at the Mission of the Southwest as a registrar. ”You make almost nothing” in such a job, said Greg Barnes.
By 1986, this arrangement was beginning to cause problems. Gene appeared disinclined to earn a living, yet he was in charge of the couple's finances. Then, at the end of 1987, the Dallas real estate market collapsed because of the savings and loan crisis, and the Slaughters, looking for new opportunity, decided to relocate to the San Francis...o...b..y area, where real estate values had skyrocketed. Left without a job when the Slaughters departed, Lisa was also $40,000 in debt, having ”squandered a lot of my earnings,” as she confessed in a church report, while borrowing substantial amounts of money to pay for her auditing.
Usually registrars would pitch a new product to people almost immediately after they'd finished a course or an auditing process; at this point they were usually in a state of euphoria and eager to do more. The registrar's next task was to help them figure out how to pay for it. If a Scientologist didn't have enough in her checking account or available credit on a credit card, the registrar might offer to help the member secure a loan from a fellow Scientologist. Or the member might be encouraged to borrow money from friends or family, or to borrow against a home or other property. Sandra Mercer,* a former Scientologist who worked as a registrar for many years, often rationalized this pressure by explaining to her clients-and to herself-that they would become more empowered in the end. As she explained it, ”When you sit somebody down and you convince them to give over their entire life savings for the cause, you look at it this way: sometimes you have to go into debt to make money.”
But some people simply couldn't handle the financial pressure. For them, there was another option, which was joining the church staff. Even though it meant one less paying client, Scientology encouraged its members to work at the orgs, since they were so often understaffed. Virtually everyone that Mercer knew in Scientology who became a staff member had signed up at least in part for financial reasons. Lisa McPherson was no different. In February 1988, Lisa told Gene her ”life's purpose” was to work for the org full-time (the Mission of the Southwest had by this time been absorbed into the official Church of Scientology and was now called the Dallas Celebrity Centre, an org focused on the upscale and more prominent Scientologists in the area), if only to force him to take more responsibility for their bills.
But by this point, their debt to the church was so high that the church would not allow Lisa to be employed there full-time without paying at least some of it off. So Lisa agreed to work for a local dentist, also a member of the Dallas Scientology community. After finis.h.i.+ng that job each day, she went straight to the org and labored until midnight. Lisa's job entailed handling communications, interacting with members, and helping keep tabs on the number of paying Scientologists currently taking courses or being audited-”bodies in the shop,” as they were known. She also reached out to ”recover” those who, for one reason or another, may have stopped attending the church.
No one could have been more determined, said Greg Barnes. Hers was among the loudest voices at daily musters, or roll calls, which always ended with a salute to the portrait of L. Ron Hubbard and a group cheer of ”Hip, hip hooray!” She was so enthusiastic that she convinced many lapsed members to resume auditing. ”Lisa was a seductress,” said Barnes. ”She had a very pleasant smile, she could engage people in conversation, she was no dummy. And she was also very attractive-and she used that. I remember people at the org talking about her, saying, 'G.o.d, what a fox.'”
But working for the org meant abiding by a disciplinary system not wholly unlike that of the Sea Organization. When Lisa did well, she was given commendations for her diligence and enthusiasm. When there were errors-if she showed up late for a study session or had to miss a few evenings at the org because she had to work late at the dentist's office-she was reported. Though Scientologists are not supposed to evaluate one another's thoughts or motivations, something that they believe would invalidate each individual's ”truth,” they are encouraged to take responsibility for one another's moral failings. Every Scientologist, whether public or staff member, is expected to report any ”out-ethics” or ”off-policy” behavior in others as a security measure; ”to show up bad apples,” as Steve Hall put it. All Scientology ent.i.ties, from the smallest mission to the most advanced of the organizations, keep ”ethics files” on every member, which includes every ”chit,” or rules violation, that he or she has ever committed.
At the Dallas church, as at all Scientology churches, staff members were reported for any drop-off or action that got in the way of an ”up” statistic-a decrease in the number of people enrolled in Scientology courses or in the number of books sold. During Lisa's tenure at the Dallas org, she was given chits for lateness, or ”job endangerment”; for mistakes that resulted in more work for her colleagues, such as using the wrong-size envelope or folder, or failing to get a FedEx package out on time; for missing her targets by not placing enough radio and newspaper ads for the ongoing Dianetics campaign and failing to write follow-up letters to members-the latter being matters of ”non-compliance,” a Scientology crime. She was also the subject of several lengthy ”Knowledge Reports” about her shaky finances and the tensions in her marriage. On one occasion, she was reported for having left a hot plate on overnight-a ”Thing That Shouldn't Be.”
By the summer of 1988, overworked between the demands of her day job and her long s.h.i.+fts at the org, Lisa was exhausted. She suffered another blow when Gene, having repeatedly ignored his wife's entreaties to help out financially, left Dallas in October and flew to Los Angeles, where he signed a billion-year contract and was absorbed into Scientology's inner sanctum, the Sea Organization. Lisa, who was not consulted about Gene's decision, was now saddled with the couple's entire debt. Furious, she resolved to join the Sea Org too. But once in California, Lisa found the regimentation and strict discipline overwhelming and, desperately homesick for Dallas, soon returned home.
Leaving the Sea Organization, or any staff position, is called ”blowing.” It came with its own cost, an onerous one: ”blown” staff members receive a ”freeloader's bill,” charging them the full price for all the courses or auditing services they had taken, for free, while in the church's employ. Therefore when Lisa returned to Dallas in the spring of 1989, she found herself $45,000 in debt, and, in accordance with church policy, she was barred from receiving any Scientology services until the money was repaid and she had gone through the appropriate ”amends” process to show that she could once again be trusted.
It was a dark time, said Carol Hawk, who reconnected with Lisa during this period. Excluded from auditing, she divorced Gene and declared bankruptcy. Then, over the next six months, Lisa struggled to make reparations, working three jobs, including one at a Domino's pizza shop. Isolated and removed from the structure of the org, she relapsed into long-discarded habits, dancing up a storm at country-western bars and even dating wogs.
But though Lisa was cut off from the services the church provided, she was not cut off from Scientology entirely. She shared an apartment with Brenda Hubert, an active member of the Dallas org, and remained in contact with several other friends and former colleagues from the church. Mixing praise with pressure, they reminded her that she was ”loved” within Scientology and urged her to straighten out her finances, ”get back in session,” and move up the Bridge. ”I am looking forward to getting your regular flows”-communications-”and seeing you have your debt fully paid off,” the director of registration, Annie Morlin, wrote Lisa in June 1990. ”I'll send you a few BREs [business reply envelopes] to make it even easier.”
In the summer of 1990, David and Bennetta Slaughter returned to Dallas. Looking for a new venture, they joined forces with their friend and fellow Scientologist Jeffrey Schaffner, hammering out a deal for a three-way partners.h.i.+p in Schaffner's company, AMC Publis.h.i.+ng, which would publish advertising packets and sell leads to the insurance industry.
As is typical with many Scientologist-owned companies, AMC used the management and administrative principles of L. Ron Hubbard, licensed to it by the World Inst.i.tute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE), the organization through which the Church of Scientology has, for more than thirty years, reached out directly to the high-earning professionals who fund most of its work. The stated purpose of WISE is to introduce Hubbard management theory into the non-Scientology world, though WISE often acts more as an intermediary between the church and the Scientology business community, licensing Hubbard's ”admin tech” to secular, Scientologist-owned companies for a fee-usually 10 or 15 percent of the gross revenue or money made from courses and consulting. These companies are then charged with instilling their work with key Scientology principles: using an ”org board” to delegate responsibilities, managing employees by statistical a.n.a.lyses of their individual productivity, and, crucially, a.s.signing them various ”conditions of existence” to improve output.
All of this is standard Scientology fare, promoted at every church and mission of Scientology in the world-and indeed, there is almost no practical difference between the technology licensed to WISE for business and that which is licensed to individual churches of Scientology to promote religion. It would be unthinkable for a Scientologist to not use Hubbard's technology in business, just as it would be unthinkable for WISE businesses to not employ fellow Scientologists, for a key function of any WISE company is to make money: for itself and also, through donations, for the church.
With that in mind, Schaffner and the Slaughters set out to hire fellow Scientologists. Lisa McPherson, whom everyone knew to be a particularly dedicated and talented telemarketer, was an obvious and early choice. Every morning, Lisa arrived at work at 8 A.M., her hair in a ponytail, and immediately started making phone calls. Salespeople endure tremendous rejection-hang-ups, insults, even threats-but Lisa took everything in stride. She never used a script but instead chatted extemporaneously with her prospects, talking about the weather, cracking jokes, often for nearly an hour. She was astonis.h.i.+ngly good at her job-so good, her former sales supervisor, s.h.i.+rley Cage, would later reflect, that she soon began setting increasingly high targets for herself, trying to best her own quotas, which would ultimately average up to $20,000 per week.
Within a year, Lisa had righted her finances and repaid her debts to the church. Now that she was eligible to receive auditing, encouraging letters from the Dallas Org once again began to flow her way. ”VWD [Very well done] on getting that debt paid off!” one staffer enthused. ”Now, get into session, gal!” And Lisa did, donating $12,000 to the Dallas Organization in 1991 and then, redoubling her efforts, giving close to $22,000 to Scientology in 1992 and $27,000 in 1993.
Still, she would have had little choice in the matter. She was now one of more than a dozen Scientologist employees at AMC, where staffers cited Hubbard's thinking on business practices such as interoffice communication and upheld his ethics code by writing up employees' ”overts” and ”withholds,” usually at the request of a company ethics officer. Working for a WISE company can be a singularly insular experience, due to the daily indoctrination of Scientology principles; this sense of isolation is intensified by the presence of church salespeople. ”When you work for one of these companies, there is constant pressure to forward Scientology's agenda,” said Sandra Mercer, who was once employed by WISE and also worked for a number of WISE-affiliated businesses. In many Scientologist companies it is not unusual to find registrars from the local organization making weekly visits to sell Scientology services to workers. Business owners see this practice as ”totally acceptable,” said Mercer; it provides evidence of commitment to the faith.* And it is even more ”acceptable” for both business owners and their employees to become field staff members (FSMs): off-site recruiters who select services for employees, colleagues, clients, or friends, earning a commission of 10 or 15 percent. In the fractured, franchise-like structure of Scientology, the FSM is a crucial component of any operation; it is the conduit by which many new members are brought into the church and the vehicle by which existing members are kept ”on course” and ”in session.”
Sandi Sampson, who worked with Lisa at the Southwestern Bell phone company, was acting as an FSM when she first ”selected” and then ”disseminated” to Lisa in 1982. For years after, Sampson was paid a commission on every course or auditing procedure she'd suggested to Lisa. By the early 1990s, Bennetta Slaughter was serving as Lisa's FSM as well as her boss. Slaughter was also, by both women's account, Lisa's best friend. If this posed any conflict of interest, Lisa never let on. ”I know that she felt like these people were her family,” said Hawk.
By 1993, AMC Publis.h.i.+ng had become a highly profitable company, employing more than twenty people. Almost all of them were Scientologists who had come up together in the Dallas church. They were ambitious, expansion-oriented, and eager to advance on the Bridge. That spring, Bennetta and David Slaughter floated the idea of relocating AMC from Dallas to Clearwater, Florida, Scientology's spiritual mecca. The Tampa Bay area was booming. And ”Flag,” as Scientology's operation in Clearwater was called, offered the most sophisticated spiritual counseling on earth.
With the Slaughters leading the way, AMC closed the operation in Dallas just before Christmas of 1993 and moved, with all twenty employees, to Florida. Tremendous fanfare accompanied their arrival. Bennetta and David Slaughter were known within the international Scientology world as important and rich OTs. At the Fort Harrison Hotel, Scientology's central base of operations in Clearwater, a steak dinner was prepared for the Slaughters and their staff at the elegant Hibiscus restaurant. The group was photographed for Source, the magazine of the Flag Land Base. ”This ends the most exciting month I can ever recall,” Lisa McPherson wrote to her friend Robin Rhyne, a Dallas Scientologist, on January 31, 1994. ”I glow constantly.”
Thousands of Scientologists came to Clearwater each year, lured by the church's depiction of Flag as the ”Mecca of Technical Perfection.” AMC was one of dozens of Scientologist-owned companies in Clearwater. There were Scientologist-run schools, nail salons, and cafes. Scientologists frequented the same restaurants and shops. They patronized one another's businesses, most of which were listed in a local guide, ”The Word of Mouth Directory of Honest & Reliable Businesses,” which listed every Scientology-friendly business in town: plumbers, realtors, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, auto mechanics, locksmiths, and health food stores. Walking down Cleveland Street, a key downtown thoroughfare that was dominated by Scientology-owned businesses, Lisa could pick up copies of church newspapers and glance through cla.s.sified ads written in Scientology's lingo. ”I don't know how I could truly convey what it's like living here,” Lisa wrote to one friend in Dallas. ”It's like Utopia.”
Chapter 10.
Flag.
IT WAS NO ACCIDENT that Scientology picked Clearwater for its mecca. A balmy outpost on a crystalline bay, it struck the church hierarchy as ”a city that could be owned,” according to Larry Brennan, who helped scout the Gulf Coast for locations in 1975 when Hubbard, still sailing on the Apollo, declared his intent to move back on land.
Clearwater in the mid-1970s was a conservative, largely elderly community, deeply resistant to change. One of the city's most ill.u.s.trious landmarks, the fifty-year-old Fort Harrison Hotel, looked like a moldy, forlorn relic of times past. In 1975, the hotel's owners put the Fort Harrison up for sale, and that October, a company named the Southern Land Development and Leasing Corporation offered just under $3 million in cash to buy both the hotel and the similarly rundown Bank of Clearwater building, across the street.
The new owner of the buildings, it was announced, was an ec.u.menical group called the United Churches of Florida. Local reporters, curious as to how a church could have access to that much cash, made inquiries but could find no records about United Churches or Southern Land Sales and Development. If that wasn't odd enough, security guards soon began to appear on the streets, lending the United Churches a rather military mien. Clearwater's mayor, Gabriel Cazares, began asking questions but found few answers. ”I am discomfited by the increasing visibility of security personnel, armed with billy clubs and mace, employed by the United Churches of Florida,” he said in a speech made shortly after the group arrived. ”I am unable to understand why this degree of security is required by a religious organization.”
Reporters from two of the local newspapers, the Clearwater Sun and the St. Petersburg Times, were equally puzzled and spent the next several months digging for information about the suspicious new church. Finally, in January 1976, a St. Petersburg Times reporter named Bette Orsini began to close in on the truth: the United Churches of Florida was really a front for the controversial and wealthy Church of Scientology.* Before Orsini could break the story, church leaders, having been tipped off, decided to make the announcement themselves; they sent a representative to rea.s.sure the community that the church meant no harm and that its members, who by now were streaming into Clearwater, were law-abiding citizens who simply wanted to practice their religion in peace.
But the people of Clearwater did not take kindly to this intrusion. Most resented the clandestine way that Scientologists had arrived and wondered about the church's true motives. These suspicions did not go away, particularly once the Church of Scientology filed lawsuits against both Cazares and the Clearwater Sun (and threatened to sue the St. Petersburg Times ), accusing them of libel and, in the case of Cazares, violation of the church's civil rights. But what alienated the people of Clearwater most was the Scientologists' insularity: the strange s.h.i.+rt-and-tie formality of their clothes; the secretiveness with which they went about their business; the strange penchant they had for suing anyone who spoke negatively of them or even asked a simple question about them or their practices.
Everything the Scientologists did seemed to put them at odds with the local community. The church purchased property from local sellers but refused to pay taxes. They closed off the Fort Harrison to the public. In March 1976, a couple who had run a gift shop inside the Fort Harrison sued for loss of business after the church abruptly shut down their air conditioning, telephone, and alarm system and refused to restore the services.
Then, in the fall of 1978, word began to leak out of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., that Scientology had far broader plans for Clearwater than simply buying property. During the FBI raid that uncovered Operation Snow White, the feds discovered doc.u.ments that detailed the Church of Scientology's plans to ”take over” the sleepy Florida city, a project code-named Operation Goldmine. As the St. Petersburg Times reported it, ”Church functionaries were directed 'to fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed.'”
Church officials were directed to identify key media and political leaders and either win their allegiance or, if that failed, discredit them through a variety of covert tactics. Reporters at the St. Petersburg Times and the Clearwater Sun who had investigated Scientology were put on an ”enemies list.” This list also included the legendary publisher of the Times, Nelson Poynter, and the paper's editor, Eugene Patterson; Mayor Cazares and the Clearwater chief of police were also cited, among others. Scientology's ”covert agents” had taken jobs at local newspapers, law firms, community agencies, and even the Greater Clearwater Chamber of Commerce. When Clearwater citizens became aware of this plot, they took it as a declaration of war. ”People were in a frenzy against Scientology when those doc.u.ments started coming out,” recalled the Was.h.i.+ngton Post writer and editor Richard Leiby, who was then a reporter for the Clearwater Sun. ”They thought they had a crazy cult in their midst.”
This was no small thing in 1978, the year of the Jonestown ma.s.sacre in Guyana. The story of the group's ma.s.s suicide was horrifying: a paranoid cult leader, Jim Jones, urging his followers to drink vats of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, leaving more than nine hundred people dead, their bodies bloated by exposure to the sun. It was one of the most heavily covered stories of the 1970s, leading the news for months after the November 1978 incident. ”Cult of Death” was the label that both Time and Newsweek gave to Jonestown. In Clearwater, people looked at the Scientologists and wondered what was next.
In the wake of the ”Clearwater Conspiracy,” as the CBS news program 60 Minutes dubbed the plot, thousands of Clearwater residents took to the streets in protest, demanding that the Church of Scientology leave town. Mayor Cazares, who'd resigned in 1978 and learned through the Snow White doc.u.ments that Scientologists intent on ruining his political career had once tried to frame him as the driver in a hit-and-run accident in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., called upon the federal government to be wary, warning that the Church of Scientology was a ”politically fascist organization.” Richard Tenney, one of the Clearwater city commissioners, spearheaded a concerned citizens group, Save Sparkling Clearwater, that held anti-Scientology rallies in public stadiums and parks. (In one particularly heated exchange, local Scientologists, infuriated by the vociferous criticism of editorialists at the Clearwater Sun, marched on the paper's downtown headquarters dressed as n.a.z.i storm troopers, an alarming sight for the city's elderly Jewish population.) But Scientology's acquisition of properties in Clearwater continued. ”We knew that no one, government or individual, could beat us legally and make us leave town,” said Larry Brennan, who, arguing that Scientology's services were religious in nature, had helped persuade the state of Florida to grant the Scientology organization a ”consumer's certificate of exemption,” which recognized it as a religious inst.i.tution and exempted it from paying, or charging, sales tax on its courses or auditing processes. ”After that, we knew we could buy whatever buildings we wanted using whatever corporate sh.e.l.l games we wanted as we were now out of the closet and legally safeguarded,” Brennan said.
By 1980, the church owned four hotels and three office complexes, a.s.sessed at $8.9 million, brokering the deals in cash. About fifteen hundred Scientologists now lived in the area full-time, it was estimated, while another five hundred or so well-off Scientologists streamed into Flag annually from all over the world, spending weeks, and sometimes months, luxuriating at the Fort Harrison, with its newly renovated rooms, its lobby decked with crystal chandeliers, and its swimming pool. Church officials, hoping to combat the negative publicity caused by the Snow White revelations, reversed previous policy and threw open the doors of the Fort Harrison. With great fanfare, the church announced a downtown revitalization project and also began donating heavily to local charities. By the fall of 1980, the Clearwater Sun had to conclude that ”Scientology is going to be part of Clearwater for a very long time.”
Over the next decade, Scientologists continued to face significant opposition. In May 1982, the city's new mayor, Charles LeCher, held public hearings to probe Scientology's activities in Clearwater, which revealed shocking tales: break-ins and infiltration of government offices, local charities, and community organizations, as well as incidents of child neglect, maggot-infested food fed to staff, and an unreported hepat.i.tis outbreak at the Fort Harrison. ”I'm not here to complain about what the church has done to me,” said a former church executive named Scott Mayer. ”I'm here to really impress upon you what you're actually dealing with, the magnitude of what you're dealing with.”
Scientology, nonetheless, continued its public relations campaign. The church hosted more open houses at the Fort Harrison, as well as free courses and Sunday wors.h.i.+p services. Scientology officials took out newspaper ads and began to make regular appearances on local cable and radio talk shows, presenting the typical Scientologist as ”the person you work with, your friend, or the person next door.” By the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology's promotional materials openly boasted of Clearwater as a spiritual mecca, inviting members to come to ”the largest community of Scientologists and OTs in the world.” And thousands did. It was no surprise that Bennetta Slaughter would want to move her company there.
It was also not surprising that David Miscavige would have looked to Clearwater for inspiration when plotting the next phase of Scientology's advancement. Fresh from his victory over the IRS, Miscavige had taken on a new, and in some ways even more ambitious, scheme: modernizing L. Ron Hubbard's teachings, specifically those pertaining to auditor training, a project he called the Golden Age of Tech, or GAT.
This was a venture the Founder, having recognized that not all auditing was performed with the same level of care or efficiency, had initiated in the late 1970s, said the Scientologist Dan Koon, who helped design part of the Golden Age of Tech. But Miscavige, said Koon and others, seized upon the idea in the 1990s as, among other things, a money-making scheme: GAT would enforce new, rote methods that every auditor, no matter how experienced, would have to learn at his or her own expense, and then follow exactly. Ultimately, everyone in Scientology would be initiated into Miscavige's GAT approach, a ma.s.sive retraining project that, over the coming years, would make millions of dollars for the church while overhauling Scientology's auditing procedures. Flag, already the church's cash cow, would be the testing ground for this new system.
Bennetta Slaughter wasted no time in Clearwater. Within a few months of her arrival, she'd ingratiated herself with the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and begun to network with local politicians. ”We called her the Queen of Clearwater,” said Sandra Mercer, who'd moved to Florida from Los Angeles in 1990. ”She put herself on all the political communication lines, on all the business communication lines ... on every communication line that she needed to get on. Had she not done that,” Mercer added, ”I don't know that the church would have done that well in Clearwater.”
David Miscavige knew Bennetta Slaughter as a prominent donor who attended yearly Scientology events in England and on the church's exclusive cruise s.h.i.+p, Freewinds. Now the leader of Scientology began to hear that she was making inroads into Clearwater society. Miscavige became concerned. For all its efforts, the official Church of Scientology had very little relations.h.i.+p with the mayor's office or the city commission, and it had an openly antagonistic relations.h.i.+p with the police. Miscavige ordered Tom De Vocht, a senior official at Flag, to find out what Slaughter was doing. ”Make sure that she's forwarding our purposes,” he said.
”So I got her in to find out what she was doing, and to explain what we wanted her to be doing,” said De Vocht, who now lives not far from Clearwater, in Tarpon Springs. ”She was an important public figure and we wanted her to be an amba.s.sador, to introduce us to people.” Slaughter, said De Vocht, agreed to act as an emissary.
Largely spurred by Slaughter's efforts, Scientologists became increasingly civic-minded: stringing the downtown streets with Christmas lights, funding blood drives, painting murals, organizing local cleanup projects. A group Slaughter founded, the Tampa Bay Organization of Women, sponsored a carnival, dubbed Winter Wonderland, to benefit poor children, and for a few weeks each December transformed a local park into an Alpine village, complete with artificial snow, a fifty-foot Christmas tree, and Santa Claus.
This softened some of the skeptics in town. Sandra Mercer described their reaction: ”'Oh, they celebrate Christmas? We didn't know that-they're just like us!' Of course we didn't really celebrate Christmas, but that was part of the overall 'safe pointing' strategy.”
”Safe pointing” is a specific Scientology policy about how to create allies. L. Ron Hubbard frequently urged his followers to present themselves as ”stable, reliable, expert [and] productive,” which would then allow them to disseminate Scientology more effectively. Slaughter prosecuted this strategy with gusto.
Lisa McPherson was a vastly different sort of person. ”She was just a sweetheart,” Mercer recalled with affection. She'd met Lisa for the first time at a Scientology event in early 1994. ”She was not at all the intense person that Bennetta was.” But Lisa was the top producer at AMC, after Slaughter herself. It was Lisa's steady productivity that allowed Slaughter to busy herself in town. ”In Scientology, Lisa was what we'd call a 'working installation,'” Mercer explained. ”She was a workhorse. And Bennetta worked her and used her.”