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Scientology 'dirty tricks' bared

Title: Scientology 'dirty tricks' bared
Date: Sunday, 25 November 1979
Publisher: Detroit Free Press
Main source: link (46 KiB)

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Washington: Court documents show the Church of Scientology put together a scheme to blackmail the Internal Revenue Service into doing a favorable tax audit on the church.

According to documents released Friday, the church stole secret IRS files on famous Americans and.planned to threaten to release them unless the audit was favorable. There was no indication any blackmail threat against any individual was made.

The documents were among thousands of files seized from the church in 1977, and ordered released Friday after nine church leaders were found guilty of a massive plot to steal government files about the church.

The memos indicated the church had files on ex-Gov. Edmund Brown of California; his son Edmund Jr., the current governor; Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and singer Frank Sinatra.

Also revealed in the documents was a scheme by the church to silence a New York writer by training her as the prime suspect in a series of bomb threats.

Paulette Cooper, 37, said the church began harassing her in 1969 when it learned she was working on a book called "The Scandal of Scientology." Shortly after the book was published in 1971, she was indicted on charges she sent a bomb threat to church offices. The charges finally were dropped in 1975.