BOSTON — George Kattar and Harvey Brower arrived in court together and sat side by side, but only Brower left the courtroom a free man after their arraignments yesterday. Kattar was led away by U.S. marshals and jailed after prosecutors said he threatened to kill a witness. The 67-year-old retired Methuen businessman was refused bail by U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Cohen. Brower, 49, of Swampscott, was released without bail. Kattar and Brower pleaded innocent in US. District Court to charges ...

Four years ago, two men walked into a New York bank and tried to cash a $2 million check drawn on the Bank of New England account of L. Ron Hubbard, the head of the Church of Scientology. The bank refused to cash the check after it could not verify the signature. Since then, the church has been on the warpath to find out who forged their now-dead founder's check. It offered a $100,000 reward, bought full-page advertisements in the country's ...

A judge has dismissed two key charges in a $25 million fraud suit brought by Larry Wollersheim, a former Scientologist who asserted the church wrecked him emotionally and financially with lies and harassment. The judge, Ronald Swearinger of Superior Court, threw out Mr. Wollersheim's claims of fraud and misrepresentation, two of the four causes of action in a 1980 civil suit that is now in its 12th week of trial. Mr. Wollersheim's attorney, Charles O'Reilly, said Judge Swearinger ruled Monday that ...

[Picture / Caption: JOHN TRAVOLTA . . . supports sect] LOS ANGELES — Actor John Travolta showed up in court to support the Church of Scientology, and told reporters, "It's been the reason I've been able to survive Hollywood." The organization is fighting a Superior Court lawsuit by former member Larry Wollersheim, who accused it of fraud and claimed it destroyed him financially and mentally.

A former official of the Church of Scientology, testifying at the trial of his suit charging the church with fraud, says church staff members engaged in a pattern of lies, tricks and deception in efforts to keep him from disclosing how the organization operates. The former official, Larry Wollersheim, who says the church should pay him $25 million in damages because it ruined him financially and emotionally, has spent three weeks testifying before a Superior Court jury here. For its part, ...

The Minutemen at the Ready [A 'suppressive person' is] Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by a Scientologist without discipline of the Scientologist [sic]. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed. —L. Ron Hubbard [Picture / Caption: "Minutemen" line courthouse halls.] On February 15, six police officers stood near the door of Leo Baeck Temple, awaiting the confrontation. They had been called by leaders of Freedom for All in Religion (FAIR), a group ...

LOS ANGELES — The Church of Scientology secretly teaches that 75 million years ago Earth was called Teegeeach and was among 90 planets ruled by Xemu, who spread his evil by thermonuclear bombs, according to court documents that sect members tried to prevent the public from seeing. Xemu, attempting to solve overpopulation problems, destroyed selected inhabitants of the planets and implanted the seeds of aberrant behavior in their spirits to affect future generations of mankind, according to the documents briefly placed ...

A Los Angeles federal judge barred further public disclosures of sacred scriptures that the Church of Scientology claims were stolen two years ago from a Denmark church. Ruling in a suit filed by the church against former member Larry Wollersheim and a rival church in Santa Barbara, U.S. District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer ordered the material sealed until a hearing Friday. The material is evidence in the Superior Court suit filed by Wollersheim, who claims he wasted thousands of dollars on ...

In one of the largest court demonstrations in Los Angeles in years, about 1,500 Church of Scientology members crammed three floors of the County Courthouse on Monday, effectively blocking public access to documents that the church considers secret and sacred. For hours, Scientologists swamped workers in the clerk's office with hundreds of requests to photocopy the documents, which reveal some of the organization's most fundamental beliefs. Scientology attorneys have argued that disclosure of the materials is a violation of the group's ...

Citing a scheduling conflict in January, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Alfred L. Margolis has removed himself from the trial of former Church of Scientology member Larry Wollersheim, who is suing the church for fraud. The judge's announcement came during the third week of pretrial motions. Margolis said he would decide the motions under submission, but asked attorneys for both sides to return for selection of a new judge. Church attorneys had told Margolis they expected the trial to last a ...

A Los Angeles judge ruled that allegations about the Church of Scientology's belief in and practice of "auditing" its members may not be introduced as evidence in a $25-million fraud suit. Superior Court Judge Alfred Margolis also granted church motions to disallow any allegations as to the efficacy, successes or failures of auditing, which is the church's term for its confidential pastoral counseling. The Rev. Ken Hoden, president of the church in Los Angeles, said the pretrial rulings were a major ...

Attorneys for the church of Scientology lost a series of key pre-trial motions Tuesday as a $25 million lawsuit seeking to challenge some of the controversial sect's most fundamental aspects got under way in a Los Angeles courtroom. The Superior Court trial began in a circus atmosphere similar to the one that permeated the recent Scientology-related case in Portland, Ore., complete with demonstrators and courtroom outbursts by church supporters. One ruling by Judge Alfred L. Margolis was to deny a church ...

About 150 people rallied at a park in downtown Los Angeles to protest a $25-million fraud suit filed against the Church of Scientology by a former member. Police said the gathering at the Court of Flags Park on North Hill Street was peaceful. Church members said they expected 2,000 to attend the daylong rally; police said they had anticipated about 1,000. While the rally was proceeding, lawyers for the church argued pretrial motions before Superior Court Judge Alfred Margolis. The lawsuit ...

The Church of Scientology filed a petition with the California Supreme Court seeking to halt a $25-million damage suit against the church by a former member. About 800 church supporters rallied outside the state court building in downtown San Francisco after marching nine miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Rev. Ken Hoden, president of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles and the church's attorney, filed the petition with the Supreme Court for an "immediate stay of trial" in the Los ...

Train of Thought? Hard on the heels of a $39 million damage award in Portland against the Church of Scientology comes a Los Angeles case that may create even more waves. Larry Wollersheim is suing the religion/corporation for more than $25 million in damages, claiming he was sold more than $100,000 worth of Scientology training on the basis of bogus promises that the training would raise his I.Q., make him "well" and give him "supernatural powers." On Monday, July 1, Wollersheirn's ...

From Sun reports A judge in Los Angeles Friday removed Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard as a defendant in a $25 million suit by a former member who claims church promises that its methods Improve mental health are a fraud. Superior Court Judge Norman Epstein said he dropped Hubbard from the suit because the plaintiff's attorneys were unable to find him for three years to serve him with official notice of the legal action. The suit continues against the ...

"Corrupt, sinister and dangerous" were the words used to describe the Church of Scientology in a judgment given by Mr Justice Latey this summer. He also referred to it as "immoral and socially obnoxious". But who controls the Church now? A major Sunday Times Magazine investigation into the activities of the cult in America and Britain has uncovered a disturbing and extraordinary story — the takeover of the organisation by a small band of youthful fanatics following the disappearance of the ...

[Picture / Caption: Scientology's headquarters in L.A. was formerly the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The church purchased It for $5 million In 1977.] Last October in San Francisco, some 70 local leaders of the Church of Scientology gathered to hear nine church executives harangue them about their shortcomings. Styling themselves with titles that ranged from the quasi-military ("Commander," "Warrant Officer") to the quasi-lunatic ("International Finance Dictator"), the men announced that they represented the new hierarchy of the organization, and that they ...

On September 5, 1980, as U.S. District Court Judge Charles Richey was recuperating from two pulmonary embolisms and exhaustion, lawyers for the Church of Scientology and the Justice Department gathered before Judge Aubrey Robinson, Richey's successor in the two-year-old conspiracy case against 11 members of the Church of Scientology. Judge Richey had already convicted and sentenced nine of the original 11 defendants, but the remaining two, recently extradited from England, were about to go on trial. "Particularly from the standpoint of ...

Church of Scientology members planned to discredit a high-level official in the California attorney general's office in Los Angeles with a bizarre undercover operation involving a pregnant woman, a phony nun and a fake bribery kickback, according to documents obtained by the Herald Examiner. The church's records of "Operation Snapper" — part of 100,000 pages of documents seized by the FBI in Los Angeles three years ago — identified the target at Lawrence Tapper, deputy attorney general in charge of the ...

WASHINGTON—The project was so top secret and top priority that L. Ron Hubbard himself christened it. He called it "Goldmine." At stake was more than $8 million in Scientology money that the Internal Revenue Service might get if top-level sect "guardians" didn't work quickly and vigorously to protect Scientology from unfavorable IRS audits. The scheme was based in Clearwater, where in November 1975 the sect had just established its phony United Churches group. But top Scientologists around the country were prepared ...