by Tony Ortega
When Gordon turned over copies of the letters, her attorneys had talked with him. They told Paulette that Gordon believed she had purposefully written the letters in an illiterate style to camouflage her involvement.
Paulette was stunned. Not only did she feel insulted that anyone would think she was capable of writing anything so illiterate as these letters, but how did Gordon explain that the same phrase – about her swollen tongue – was in one of the bomb threat letters and the smear letter that had been sent to the residents of the Churchill? Had Paulette smeared herself by sending that revolting letter to her neighbors?
Her attorneys had pointed that out, they said. And they insisted that Paulette had no motive to cause such trouble – her career was going well, she had books coming out, why would she bother? But they said Gordon believed that a disturbed person could act in irrational ways. He thought it was possible that she could have written the smear letter to the residents of the Churchill in order to camouflage her involvement in the bomb threats.
It made no sense to Paulette, and she still didn’t know what physical evidence Gordon believed he had, besides the ridiculous letters themselves.
Paulette would be questioned the next day before the grand jury, and they wondered what made Gordon so sure she had typed the letters. Had Gordon somehow obtained other letters or manuscripts that Paulette had typed, and compared them to the bomb threats? Did Gordon believe they’d had all been created on the same typewriter?
Paulette had forgotten that Nibs had had access to her machine the previous summer. Robert Kaufman had also come over on occasion. And so had other people. Her lawyers hired their own expert to examine her typewriter. Was it the key to the case?
The next day, while she waited outside the grand jury room for the session to begin, Paulette saw James Meisler, presumably waiting to testify against her. She also noticed FBI agent Brotman come out of the room. He avoided her stare. (Brotman was commended for his work investigating Paulette. He later boasted about his success in the case and showed off his commendation to an old college roommate, not realizing that he happened to be Paulette’s cousin.)
Paulette told herself she could get through this. She only needed to tell the truth, and she’d be fine. She hadn’t typed or sent the silly bomb threat letters, and as long as she told the truth, they couldn’t charge her with a crime.
Gordon began asking her questions, soliciting basic information about her background and what she did for a living. Then he presented her the letters, and she had the first opportunity to see them and their envelopes in their original form. They were on two kinds of stationery. The first letter was on typical stationery, but the second one was on paper that was lightweight airmail paper, which surprised her. If you were going to send a letter from one address in New York City to another, you wouldn’t use that kind of paper. Gordon started asking her about the letters, about the stationery, about the words.
She calmly answered what she knew. She had never seen the letters until she had seen copies of them the previous day at her attorney’s office. She didn’t know where the stationery came from. She didn’t recognize the writing in them.
Gordon pressed her, asking her if she’d touched the letters.
They weren’t mine. So I didn’t touch them, she said.
Did you type them?
No.
If you didn’t write them, who do you think did?
I would assume Mr. Meisler knows the answer to that question, she answered.
For what seemed like hours, Gordon, who had a nervous habit of shaking his leg, went around the same territory, asking her about the same things. Finally, he ended the questioning and asked her to leave the room.
A short time later, he asked her to come back in.
Something was different. He was no longer asking her accusatory questions. Now, he calmly asked for her Social Security number. He asked if she was on any medications or drugs. He asked if she was aware of her current circumstances.
What was he getting at? She told him of course she knew what was happening and why she was there. She noticed that his leg was shaking even more.
At that point, Gordon leaned in and lowered his sight at her. “Well, then, could you explain how your fingerprint got on the second letter?”
Paulette felt faint as the blood rushed from her face. She thought she was going to collapse. She managed to keep her outward composure, but the room felt like it was spinning.
Gordon told her that besides her fingerprint on one of the letters, the government had hired a document expert who had compared samples of other things Paulette had typed, and the expert concluded that her machine had been used to type up the two bomb threat letters.
Paulette didn’t know why her fingerprint would be on one of the letters, but she suspected that L. Ron Hubbard Jr. – Nibs – had some involvement because of the wording in them. She pointed out that he had worked with her the previous summer, and he’d had access to her apartment.
By the time she got done talking about Nibs, she was feeling better. She’d spent the whole day telling the truth. And telling the truth would convince the jurors that she had nothing to do with the threats.
The next day, her attorney phoned. Though it was Charles Stillman she had hired because of his reputation as a former prosecutor, it was Stillman’s younger colleague, Jay Zelermyer, who was doing most of the leg work on her case. Just a few years out of law school, Zelermyer actually had extensive contacts in New York’s prosecutor circles, through Stillman, and he had called Gordon to find out the result of the grand jury proceedings.
Paulette assumed everything was going to turn out fine. So she was stunned when he told her that Gordon planned to indict her on two counts for the bomb threats, and a third count for perjury. Gordon believed she had lied to the grand jury.
She felt unsteady on her feet. She couldn’t assimilate the news – she saw her life falling apart, her career over. She would have to go through a very public trial. She might even go to prison. Her lawyers said that details about her private life would be presented by the prosecution to build a case intended to show that she was capable of sending bomb threats. That she’d smoked pot. That she’d slept with several men and had never been married. It might have been the Sexual Revolution, but she knew what the newspapers would do with that kind of information, and her parents would have to be exposed to it.
Barbara came down and tried to console her, but it was hopeless. She was crying. And drinking. And smoking like a fiend. Paula Tyler came over to hear what had happened. She seemed shocked and horrified by the news. And then Paulette had to call and tell her parents.
She told her father that she was going to be indicted. Ted Cooper tried to console her but she was almost incoherent. When she mentioned that the trial was going to cost a lot of money, he said he was prepared to back her up financially, whatever she had done.
“But just out of curiosity,” he said, “did you do it?”
Paulette couldn’t believe it.
“Dad, I’ve lied to you about a few things in the past, like what time I really came home some nights. But this is important, so I wouldn’t lie to you about it,” she said. “I didn’t do it.”
Paula Tyler could hear the emotion in Paulette’s voice, and her own eyes began to water as Paulette began to cry at what her father said.
“Mom and I wouldn’t want you to perjure yourself before a grand jury and admit to a crime you didn’t do just to save us money,” he said. “And if we have to sell the house to defend you, we’ll do it.”
Paulette could hear that her father was holding back tears. Hearing him almost crying made her start up again and then Paula could no longer control herself. She and Paula and Barbara wept and wept.
Six miles away, on the second floor of a house in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, L. Ron Hubbard was sitting at a small desk, tapping away at a typewriter on a project that had taken up much of the winter and early spring.
After a
bleak Christmas in Forest Hills, Hubbard and Jim Dincalci and Paul Preston had moved about two miles west to a two-story walkup in the middle of the block on a short street named Codwise Place. Dincalci and Preston told the family living downstairs that Hubbard was their uncle.
Hubbard made a few forays into the neighborhood, but mostly he stayed in the apartment and watched a lot of television. Dincalci prepared meals, and Preston decoded messages coming from the Apollo. They used a dictionary for the cipher, with a number like “155/9” referring to the ninth word on page 155 of the American Heritage Dictionary. Preston converted numbers into words and words into numbers, and relayed messages on a payphone down the street.
Their first couple of months in New York, Hubbard complained of various ailments, and his teeth were rotting in his head. One tooth actually fell out, and Dincalci tried to get Hubbard to see a dentist. A large sebaceous cyst had developed on Hubbard’s forehead, and he forbade Dincalci from doing anything about it. But Dincalci did get him into Manhattan to see a chiropractor and started him on a regimen of allergy shots. Gradually, over the winter, Hubbard began to feel better.
As his health improved, Hubbard began to take more interest in the communications going back and forth to the Apollo, and also to consider where things with Scientology might be headed.
For the last few years, his armada had been kicked out of one country after another, and now they were running out of available ports. If something wasn’t done about it, what kind of future could Scientology have?
In 1967, the Freedom of Information Act had gone into effect after being signed into law the year before by President Lyndon Johnson. Scientology had been one of the first to make extensive use of it, ordering its attorneys to find out how much information government agencies had about Hubbard in their files (it turned out to be a great deal).
While he sat in the apartment in Queens, Hubbard worked out an ambitious plan that he thought might take care of all these problems at the same time. If the negative information about Scientology could be retrieved and expunged from files in major countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, it would stop the damaging reports going to smaller countries like Greece and Morocco and Portugal that were turning away Hubbard and his ships.
On April 28, 1973, after much back and forth with the Guardian’s Office, Hubbard finalized plans for the new project—numbered GO 732—which would target documents in 17 countries. Hubbard called it the “Snow White Program.”
“A gradual reduction of available countries occurring since 1967, trend DANGER,” the Guardian’s Order read. “Recent exposures of official records have brought about the possession of data showing that England and the US have in the past spread false reports in several other countries which have caused trouble.”
The plan to counter those reports was to expose them and, through litigation, get them destroyed.
In the detailed April 28 report, different countries were considered separate “Snow White Operating Targets,” or SWOTs. SWOT 4, for example was Portugal, and was also known as “Project Mirror.” SWOT 9 was Belgium (Project Bashful), and SWOT 11 was Italy (Project Dopey). Project Hunter would target the United States, while Project Witch and Project Stepmother each would operate in the United Kingdom. (Hubbard had sent Jim Dincalci to the library to look up names from the fairy tale for him to use in the project.)
The document talked about “legally” expunging files, but in its details, it talked about suing psychiatrists for genocide, “clearing” files in countries around the world, and obtaining documents “by any means.”
Hubbard had given his worldwide espionage organization an audacious new goal. By any means, his operatives had been instructed to infiltrate every government organization on Earth that might harbor negative information about him—and destroy it.
In Queens that spring, however, the scene hardly resembled a spy thriller. After Dincalci prepared dinner, Hubbard would regale him with yarns about his past. About how the press was wrong that he’d never finished college, and that he had been one of the first casualties of the Second World War. (His war record didn’t reflect it, however.) He told Dincalci that the cyst on his forehead was filled with shrapnel from that injury, but Dincalci had it X-rayed and didn’t find any shrapnel in it.
Hubbard also went into the wild exploits of his past lives on other planets. When he went into these tales, Hubbard looked off into space, and Dincalci noticed that the 62-year-old man went into a kind of reverie while he spoke. Then, after a lengthy narrative, he’d come out of it, blinking his eyes and smacking his lips while he looked around, like he was trying to remember where he was. Dincalci thought it was odd.
On May 17, 1973, Paulette was indicted. The three counts – two for the bomb threats, one for perjury for lying to the grand jury – each carried penalties of 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $5,000, for a total of 15 years and $15,000.
The intervening days were more torture. Each time she went to the Churchill’s lobby, she was afraid she would see police arriving to take her away. Her lawyers arranged for her to turn herself in.
On May 27, she went to the federal courthouse to be arraigned. She found herself in a room of people eyeing her curiously and wondering what she was doing there. Her attorneys were with her, as well as her parents and her father’s lawyer, Irving Gruber, whom she had known her entire life.
She was embarrassed that Irving was there to witness her humiliation. Her lawyers had suggested that her mother wear her finest – and Stella was there wearing a mink coat and her diamonds. They wanted to give the magistrate the right impression. But her mother just looked out of place (in fact they all did), and Paulette couldn’t help noticing the covetous looks aimed her mother’s way by the other suspects awaiting arraignment.
Paulette was then marched downstairs to be fingerprinted and have her mug shot taken. She tried to make a few jokes, but she wasn’t laughing inside. She was fortunate that no reporters were hanging around. They were in another courtroom, where one of the Watergate figures was in a hearing, and so far, word of Paulette’s indictment had not become news.
Leaving the courtroom, she opened the envelope she’d been given to look at the indictment inside. The title on it horrified her.
The United States of America vs. Paulette Marcia Cooper
She felt like 200 million people – the entire country – had just declared itself to be against her. The United States vs. me, she thought, shaking her head.
As a condition of her indictment, she could not leave the state of New York. That alone was going to be a headache, she thought. She had good friends in New Jersey and Connecticut who were just minutes away. But now they might as well be on the moon.
Jay Zelermyer, her attorney, talked over with her the very real consequences she was facing. He had hired a document examiner of his own at Paulette’s expense, and she had also concluded that Paulette’s machine was used to type the bomb threat letters. Paulette’s chances for conviction were very real. But Zelermyer told her she might get only a few years in federal prison because of her lack of a criminal record.
“Only a few years,” she thought. And she wondered how she’d survive prison.
Every day, Paulette was sure her story would hit the press. And if it did, she knew her life as a writer was over. She could see the headline on the cover of the New York Post: “Woman Writer Threatens to Blow Up Church” or something similarly sensational. The readers of a paper like the Post – in fact, the readers of just about any publication – would not understand the difference between an indictment and a conviction. And with Scientology still a mystery to most people, all that mattered was that she’d supposedly endangered a religious facility.
Even if she weren’t convicted, what editor would hire a writer who had been accused of trying to blow up the subject of one of her books?
The likelihood of ruinous publicity weighed on her as much as the coming trial, which was scheduled for October 31 – Halloween, a
ppropriately enough. If the trial happened, then she knew the publicity would come. The thought of what her parents might have to endure if that happened wore her down.
Then, also in May, she learned that it was already worse than she thought: Her parents had been targeted. She only now found out that two months earlier another smear letter had arrived at her parents’ home in Mamaroneck. Again, the allegations were outlandish and were intended to upset the Coopers and Paulette. The letter said Paulette couldn’t write, and that she’d had perverted sex with the Coopers’ rabbi. Ted and Stella Cooper were religious Jews, and the accusation, as groundless as it was, was upsetting to all of them.
The letter also suggested that the real people behind her ongoing harassment were Bernie and Barbara Green. The thought that the Greens were behind her harassment – even with their affinity for Scientology’s underlying ideas – struck Paulette as just another bad joke by Scientology and an attempt to pull them into the mess.
It was clear to her that the letter was another ham-fisted attempt to hurt her. But the thought of her parents reading it felt like a knife stabbing into her.
She was so sensitive to what they thought of her – the previous summer, she’d felt elated by their praise at her books coming out. But now, they had to read filth about her screwing their rabbi. And their daughter had been indicted and faced fifteen years in prison. They told Paulette they had warned their close friends to expect to see some unpleasant stories about their daughter in the newspapers, even though she was completely innocent of the charges. She hated that her parents felt compelled to say something to their friends.
Paulette was beginning to despair, and with that came desperate thoughts.
7
Jerry
At least Paulette had her friends at the Churchill. Barbara visited multiple times each day and was always willing to listen to her troubles. Paula Tyler was not only coming by nearly every day to check up on her, but she also started bringing around a guy she knew. His name was Jerry Levin.
