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the mainstream religions that judges and jurors were likely to be members of.
In the 1990s, Flinn had interviewed several Scientologists who were doing RPF in Los
Angeles. Their quarters didn’t look any worse than his cell in the monastery, where he
slept on a straw bed on a board. He asked if they were free to go. They told him they
were, but they wanted to stay and do penance.
Flinn admits to having been a cutup when he was in the order, and he felt out of
place. “I was an Irishman in a sea of Germans.” He would be sent out to dig the potato
eld as punishment for his misbehavior. However, when he nally decided to leave his
order, instead of being incarcerated or given a freeloader tab, he was given a
dispensation releasing him from his vows. He never felt the need to escape. He took o
his robe, put on civilian clothes, and walked away. His spiritual adviser gave him ve
hundred dollars to help him out. He was never punished or ned, or made to disconnect
from anyone.
IN TRUTH, the IRS was ill equipped to make a case in court that Scientology—or any other
creed—was not a religion. Moreover, the commissioner of the IRS, Fred T. Goldberg, Jr.,
had to balance the longing on the part of some of his executives to destroy the church
against the need to keep his resources, both human and nancial, from being sucked
into the black hole that Scientology had created.
One afternoon in Washington, in October 1991, Miscavige and Rathbun were having
lunch at the Bombay Club, a swank Indian restaurant near the White House. Miscavige
was fed up with the stalemate, which looked as if it could go on forever, in an endless
stream of billable hours to the church’s attorneys. At the lunch, Miscavige announced to
Gerald Feer, one of their lawyers, “Marty and I are just going to bypass you entirely.
We’re going to see Fred.”
Feffer laughed at the thought that Miscavige would talk directly to the commissioner.
“I’m not joking,” Miscavige said. “Marty, do you want to go?”
The two men hailed a cab after lunch and went to 1111 Constitution Avenue, the IRS
headquarters, and announced to the security ocer that they wanted to see the
commissioner.
“Is he expecting you?”
“No, but if you phone him on the intercom and tell him we are from the Church of
Scientology, I’m sure he’d love to see us.”
Within a few moments, several of the commissioner’s aides came down to the lobby.
Miscavige told them that he wanted to bury the hatchet. He said he knew how much
hatred there was on each side, going back for decades, and that an intervention from
the top was necessary. An hour later there was a call in their hotel room saying the
commissioner would see them the following week.
In that rst meeting with Goldberg, in a drab government conference room at a giant
table, Miscavige, Rathbun, and Heber Jentzsch were facing about a dozen upper-level
government bureaucrats, including the commissioner. The level of distrust between the
negotiating parties was extreme, made even greater for the IRS representatives who