At Saturday’s “Operation: Fair Game: Stop,” Anonymous’ latest installment in a series of monthly global protests, one local member abandoned his ridiculous three-pronged disguise of glasses, a fake nose and a mustache. Instead Mike Vitale wore his name in white letters emblazoned across a black cotton T-shirt. For Vitale, it’s no longer necessary to obscure his face with the cheap gag getup. The Church of Scientology already knows who he is and where he lives. Days before the protest focusing on ...

When Anonymous members huddle in front of Scientology centers at monthly protests across the globe, their identities remain hidden behind plastic Guy Fawkes masks or dark sunglasses or brightly colored wigs. Their names remain withheld from each other and media outlets covering their events in order to shield themselves from the harsh backlash that the Church of Scientology is said to reserve for its critics: “fair game.” On Saturday, Anonymous plans its fourth round of international protests, “Operation: Fair Game: Stop,” ...

CNN’s John Roberts this morning, trying to get a typically squirrelly Scientology spokesman, Tommy Davis, to answer some basic questions about L. Ron Hubbard’s outfit... Roberts: “There are some people, and one of them is a correspondent for the Village Voice, who says the basic tenet of the Church of Scientology is to rid the body of space-alien parasites, to clear oneself.” Davis: “Well, John, does that sound silly to you? I mean it’s unrecognizable to me.” The shout-out from CNN ...

[Picture / Caption: That's Mike Vitale. Guess the costume didn't work too well.] When Queens resident Mike Vitale was outed as a member of Anonymous by the Church of Scientology last month, he specifically asked Church members if they planned to prove his criticisms correct by declaring him “fair game” and subjecting him to the threats and intimidation that are said to be inherent in that Church policy. Would they threaten him or show up at his house? Well, they did—or, ...

Two weeks ago, in a YouTube video and an interview in the Voice, Jason Beghe denounced Scientology as a "rip-off" that "brainwashed" its members. A veteran actor of films and TV, Beghe recently left Scientology after 12 years in the controversial church, during which he estimates he spent a million dollars on classes and training in Scientology’s arcane practices. Beghe went public with his newest offensive against the church last night by posting online a letter addressed to Scientology leader David ...

What do you expect when a program as mainstream as Nightline tries to take on a moving story like the new, growing opposition to Scientology? Certainly not something this weak. Stumbling in the footsteps of a recent terrific story by John Cook at Radar, Nightline tried to tell the story of Jenna Miscavige Hill last night. Why is her story important? She’s niece to the tiny leader of Scientology, David Miscavige, so her defection, and subsequent allegations about how her family ...

Veteran television actor Jason Beghe tells the Village Voice that the Church of Scientology will be feeling blindsided by the YouTube video of him that hit the Internet on March 14. Long-held frustrations with the church motivated Beghe to leave Scientology seven months ago, after he had spent about 12 years in the organization as one of its most celebrated success stories. Over the course of about a year, he negotiated his "disassociation" with the church, trying to give every indication ...

L. Ron Hubbard, the pulp fiction writer who gave the world Battlefield Earth, as well as a nuisance known as Scientology, would have turned 97 years old this Thursday, March 13. Ron’s been worm food for more than a score of years now, so it probably won’t matter to him that the best birthday party being held in his name will take place a couple of days late. On Saturday, March 15, the surprisingly upstart, leaderless movement known as “Anonymous” will ...

Recently, the Church of Scientology announced that it was purchasing three buildings on East 125th Street for an estimated $10 million. Since 2003, the controversial religion had been running a mostly overlooked storefront on Third Avenue between 122nd and 123rd streets, but the new expansion marks a major move into Harlem. The buildings will be fully renovated and turned into not only a church, but a community center with the usual Scientology programs: job training, literacy and drug rehab. Media reports ...

Every year in St. Louis County, on the fourth Monday in August, more than one thousand properties are placed on the auction block. County revenue officials and eager bidders converge on council chambers to divvy up land on which owners have not paid property taxes for three years. The tax-delinquent citizenry are warned in advance that their real estate will go to the highest bidder if they haven't paid at least one year's worth of back taxes. The deadline is auction ...

In July 2003, a nonprofit called Applied Scholastics International opened a spanking-new headquarters on 55 acres in Spanish Lake. Among those who attended the festivities were U.S. Congressman William "Lacy" Clay and actors Tom Cruise and Anne Archer. Newspapers from coast to coast published stories heralding the group's move from LA to the great Midwest. After the initial fanfare, Applied Scholastics quietly went about its business: pitching tutoring services to local groups with after-school programs and looking to ally with prominent ...

Maybe it was "Defy Evil Bushism" or "Christmas Is No Fun in Fallujah." Or it may have been one of the other not-so-subtle references to President George W. Bush posted on the sign next to his law office; perhaps "Vote the Thug Out." Or was it the sight of the American flag suspended upside down from that same sign, in protest of the outcome of last November's election? Ford Greene isn't quite sure what sent his opponents over the edge with ...

A 22-year legal battle came to an abrupt end last week when the Church of Scientology paid $8.67 million to one of its harshest critics: a former member who claimed the church had harassed him for years and driven him "to the brink of insanity." The settlement between the church's California organization and former Boulder resident Lawrence Wollersheim is notable not only for its size, but for its public nature. In the past, litigation involving the controversial "new religion"—founded by science-fiction ...

In response to the July 24 Post-Gazette news articles "Scientology Comes to Town": As a 60-year resident of Pittsburgh and a 20-year member of the Church of Scientology, I am compelled to set the record straight on your July 24 articles about Scientology. The article missed the help the church and its members are extending to millions around the world, including residents of Pennsylvania. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were a rude awakening for everyone. For many of us, ...

A web of intrigue surrounds the high-stakes legal brawl between FACTnet and the Church of Scientology. Strange things happen around Lawrence Wollersheim. His businesses collapse. His Boulder apartment gets raided by federal marshals, his computers seized. When college students offer to help him rebuild his computer bulletin-board system, they receive threatening phone calls–anonymous voices urging them to stay away from Larry. A California judge who presided over a lawsuit in which Wollersheim was the plaintiff told reporters he'd encountered a lot ...

Walter Plywaski placed the blue yarmulke on his head. A Jew by ethnicity but an atheist by choice, he rarely wore the symbol of faith. But it seemed important now, as he stood near a mass burial site for Jews murdered at what had once been the Riederloh "punishment" camp in Germany. Somewhere beneath the stone markers, he believed, were the remains of the father he'd seen beaten to death for cursing an SS commandant in January 1945. Fifty years later, ...

Clients of deprogrammer Rick Ross call him a savior. Perhaps that's why people he's branded cult leaders want to crucify him. Rick Ross is describing how Arizona's cults use mind control to exploit their members. He warns about 70 people gathered at Arizona State University's Memorial Union that they are prime targets for groups that tend to prey on university students. The Moonies have a house on North Central. Scientology has a church in Mesa. There's Scottsdale's CBJ, whose members believe ...

The growing popularity of the Internet has spawned discussion groups that offer something for just about everyone, from lovers of Jean-Luc Picard (try alt.sexy.bald.captains) to haters of a certain children's television program (alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die) to obsessives consumed by politics, computer lore, comic books or the hidden messages embedded in a single rock song (alt.meter-maid.lovely.rita). Few newsgroups, though, have drawn the kind of following now evident on alt.religion.scientology (a.r.s.), an international debating circle concerning the Church of Scientology. Always controversial, in recent months ...

IN THE ONLINE BRAWL OVER SCIENTOLOGY, INTERNET USERS DISCOVER THAT VIRTUAL REALITY BITES BACK.SHOWDOWN IN CYBERSPACE THE BATTLE OVER SCIENTOLOGY'S SECRETS IGNITES A HOLY WAR ON THE INTERNET. Lawrence Wollersheim's hands shake as he reads his notes, ticking off the damage done to his computers. Surrounding the 46-year-old Boulder resident is a cluster of reporters and, beyond that, a ring of glowering, dark-suited men (and one woman wearing a clerical collar), all packed into a hallway of the federal courthouse in ...

Rick Ross, self-confessed "cult deprogrammer" and ATF advisor in the Waco holocaust has been charged, in the United States, with the 1991 abduction of a Christian teenage boy. Ross and his accomplices, Mark Workman and Charles Simpson, were charged in July with unlawful imprisonment in the abduction of Jason Scott. If convicted they face a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. The charges against the three were the most recent in a string of legal actions brought against deprogrammers by ...

And now, the next Walt Disney Studios— the Church of Scientology! That is, if entrepreneurs connected with the Hollywood based cult can muscle into the film business with their proposal to homogenize films by tailoring them to the tastes of the unwashed masses. It all began last July, when Future Films, a new, eccentric studio, began running ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter touting its revolutionary ideas. No one knew what to make of it all. The grand concept, to ...

A Congressional Subcommittee has been given the names of South American Interpol officials who are using their position to traffic in cocaine and been asked to curtail U.S. relations with the private, French-based police association. The information that Interpol officials have been Involved in drug trafficking came as the result of a 7 month, 7 nation investigation by Vaughn Young, Research Director of the Church of Scientology's National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice (NCLE). Young stated in his letter ...

The true measures of the false prophet are an unrelenting certainty and a staggering income. The immediate impression of L. Ron Hubbard, the prophet of Scientology, which emerges from George Malko's "Scientology: The Now Religion," is of a windbag hustler. There is not a single question Hubbard cannot answer easily and definitively. This and the fact that Hubbard personally has been making something around $140,000 a week from Scientology (that is, as Malko tells is, week in and week out) I ...