Here is the latest list of donors suckers for this ridiculous boondoggle.
In March of this year Tony Ortega put the latest list on his site along with what each level of crazy cost to reach and how many deluded donators they had snared.
Here is an update:
And some math to help us understand what is really going on:
LRH Hall Member: $25,000
In March this list according to Tony had about 300 suckers. It’s now about 350.
350 x $25,000 = $8,750,000
Elite Member: $50,000
In March Tony counted about 75 of these. Today there are 102.
102 x $50,000 = $5,100,000
Key Member: $100,000
In March there were about 60 Key Members, now there are 62.
62 x $100,000 = $6,100,000
Founding Member: $250,000
About 50 in March, now 32.
32 x $250,000 = $8,000,000
Master Member: $500,000
About 25 in March, now 16.
16 x $500,000 = $8,000,000
Senior Master Member
They added this since last time — assume it is $750,000. There are 2 of them.
2 x $750,000 = $1,500,000
Legion of Honor: $1 million
In March there were 30 of these million dollar suckers. Now there are 28.
28 x $1,000,000 = $28,000,000
Legion of Honor with Honors: $1.5 million
10 of these in March, now 11.
11 x $1,500,000 = $16,500,00
Senior Legion of Honor: $2 million
7 of them in March, now 8.
8 x $2,000,000 = $16,000,000
Legion of Elite Honor: $2.5 million
2 in March, remains the same at 2.
2 x $2,500,000 = $5,000,000
Legion of Distinction: $5 million
3 in March, now 2.
2 x $5,000,000 = $10,000,000
Legion of Distinction with Honors: $7.5 million
1 in March, 2 today.
2 x $7,500,000 = $15,000,000
Legion of Nobility: $10 million
Doug and Lauri Dohring of ABC Mouse in March, they remain the only members of the Legion of Nobility. Must be lonely at the top…
1 x $10,000,000 = $10,000,000
Opus Extraordinaire: $20 million?
In March, Tony noted “This special designation has been set aside for the Pumphrey family, who run the Harlem org and have given another $10 million to the IAS. Is this the wealthiest African-American family in Scientology?” — they don’t appear at all on the new list.
Illuminare: $30 million?
Bob and Trish Duggan remain at the head of the class.
1 x $30,000,000 = $30,000,000
This totals just shy of $170,000,000 (not counting the Pumphreys).
So, just for comparison, I did a quick Google search on recently opened newly constructed auditoriums. This is the Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa. A WAY more impressive building than the L. Ron Hubbard Hall. It opened in 2016. Cost $176 million.
It would appear they have already raised more than they need to construct this lame exercise:
In this earlier post The L. Ron Hubbard Hall Money-Making Machine, I noted that scientology had filed a BUILDING PERMIT in November 2018 for their $137 million construction.
So, even by their OWN documents, they have already collected more than they need for this white elephant. But that is not slowing down their fundraising efforts. But they have not begun any construction. Of course, as soon as they start construction the fundraising will dry up. So, they’re not about to get around to it any time soon. It took the Garcia’s raising a stink before they finished the SP building…
As of now, there is nothing on the horizon to replace this — but they WILL think of something.
As for “Walking Ron’s Journey” they take these people on trips to see the sights in DC that Ron may have visited etc. A total sham like everything else. They get the sanitized version of the life of L. Ron Hubbard.
The Hancher Auditorium is gorgeous. I hope to visit one day. What’s the Hubs Hall gonna provide to a Scientology-only crowd? I’m guessing to won’t be Handel’s Messiah, or Sunday In The Park With George. Maybe “Battlefield Earth: The Musical”, with 3-hour, locked-door speech about the importance of funding the IAS…
This is far better than a ponzu scheme. No jail time and the ‘losses’ are tax deductible.
PT Barnum was right when it came to suckers. This is proof.
I know who one of the elite “suckers” is. It’s wild to see the name of someone I’ve actually met on one of these lists. Especially from a state like the one I live in.
I can’t believe the Dirmans are still in.
Talk about completely brainwashed to the point of imbecility.
Those two have seen, participated and caused more madness during their Sea Org days than could ever be documented.
Some people never wake up,
That’s the sad part.
Doesn’t bother me at all that these people are being milked. Actually, kinda like it. Makes me feel even better about the bullet I dodged by leaving.
Noticed on one list the names David and Jodi Weissberg. He wouldn’t be the late Ruthie Discher’s (ASHO staff) son, would he? Anybody know? (She was a good friend of mine for thirty years).
*Who doubts that Miscavige is a freaking money making genius? Gazillions for only status in exchange!
** Yeah, that Univ.Iowa building is a beauty. I bet the building itself becomes a destination view, like the Sydney Opera House.
Yes, that’s Ruthie’s son. When I was around she was was Ruthie Silverman…
Thanks Mike. I remember the kid being a handfull over forty years ago.
As good as friends as Ruthie and I were, in all those decades, she never once regged me. ASHO always got Bill Bertinot or Ken Shapiro to get on me (I liked them too and gave them my money, but we were never friends).
When I left in 2006, I wouldn’t open my door to SO members no matter how many times they knocked or stood outside the door. I wouldn’t pick up my phone when ASHO called. Had Ruthie not passed away, and had ASHO sent her to my door, I don’t think I could have ignored her. Would I have been successfully “handled” then? I’ll never know. Just glad I left and with some money in the bank.
Can anyone really see Dungheap Macabre putting upwards of $170,000,000 into a building when it could be collecting interest in an off shore bank? Anyway, he hasn’t, by a long shot, finished crushing that stone into dust to bleed it more.
The University of Iowa auditorium is a stunning
piece of architecture while LRH hall looks like a
bunker. Dave, you should fire your architects! But
then again you probably need a fortress.
A Clear package is 30 thousand. So for the donated money of let’s say 137 million, they could have hypothetically made over 4500 Clears!
Imagine all that “theta” released onto the world!
What about we just get a bunch of new people to do the first two big steps? Purif and SRD. That would be over 27 thousand people!
Clearing the planet is not the goal, deep down I think they know that’s a lost cause. You’d have to first find the willing PCs, get them to qualify, then deliver the auditing! Would be impossible! So buildings and property is their game now.
Total scam.
4500 ‘clears’ presumes that what Dave has packaged up is effective enough to create what passes for ‘clear’ these days. Even 40 years ago, when I attested, ‘clear’ wasn’t anything like he described in D:MSMH. Looking back, it seems I wasn’t quite as capable as before I encountered scientology. All these
years later, I’m STILL peeling away false “facts” I picked up while “in”. e.g. an early leaning toward Trump and even sorta agreeing with some of his executive actions.
Maybe the $137M includes pneumatic lines plumbed from a bank of large underground compressors. Each seat will have instead of a seat cushion an inflatable Scientologist so that when Der Dwarfenfuhrer gives his Nuremburg rallies they can truly fill the auditorum.
Kind of a Scientology version of Fletcher’s Memorial Home for Incurable Cult Leaders and Megalomaniacs (sorry for the Pink Floyd reference).
😂🤣😂🤣
“The hall will be an economic dynamo that will bring and estimated 200,000-plus people through its doors each year.”
More than 200,000 people each year. Are they going to force each of their members to visit 10 times a year, that is about once every 5 weeks? That’s worse than the semiannual Oat Tea 7 visits. Culties going to love it (OR ELSE!).
Compare the 200,000 with the numbers scientology says it brings to Clearwater vs the number of real tourists who have been driven away. My guess is that fewer will enter LRH Hall than currently go in the Ruth Eckerd Hall. If I ever return to CW for a visit, I’ll be sure to join the *Cult City Tours* at least once to see the damage for myself.
They should start “Ron’s Journey” by flunking everyone out of university, force participants to engage in Sex Magick, throw them all out of the country, and finish with getting everyone addicted to psychedelic drugs and spending the rest of their lives alone and paranoid in a Bluebird bus.
COB will be fund raising for a new boat next. That’ll be a boondoggle to end all boondoggles unless Freewinds I actually sinks before the hall is built.
And the crowning con for the “Freewinds II” will be paying for the Sea Org slaves to paint the S.O. emblem on the foremost smokestack. That’ll cost at least $5 Million to each of the whales that falls for it.That will make their status “Gullible extremus Maximus”.
For me, just my opinion which really doesn’t matter all that much, but if these people want to toss their life away then that’s their business. What I think is criminal about all this money they toss in is they are financing a criminal enterprise, business, and the criminal, unforgivable act of protecting child abusers.
Agree with you 100%
Stunning. $170,000.00 Plus and counting…. Another scam. Just like the Super Power Building where they just kept pounding people for more donations for it. This must make people like Luis Garcia sick to his stomach; I wonder if some of its members will be pounded on to donate to the cross.
Mary, I think the figure was in the millions: $170,000,000.00 which makes it even more nauseating.
I expect the crowning boondoggle won’t be a cross but something equally as insignificant — and non-religious. With a cross on top, the building becomes ‘religious’, perhaps even a cathedral
— inappropriate for the secular events I believe they want to host there. Of course, they wouldn’t want Wogs messing up their hall, I would think.
Danish though they may be, I decry the Holstien family besmirching the good name of bovines everywhere. Legion of Elite Honor my left testicle.
Mike, that is a lot of deluded cash flowing to DM. I wonder how much commission was paid out to the Regs or fund raisers?
I’m sure regs and fund raisers have to pay for their ow bridge and/or IAS or whatever using that money, so 0%….?
The Taufers are listed as Legion of Honor with Honors donators. 1.5 million clams.
I knew the Taufer clan back in the day. John, the late patriarch was a blue collar carpenter. He had a fairly large family of seven children if I recall correctly. I don’t think all of the kids were his, some may have been part of a previous marriage. I could be wrong here, but I believe our old friend Quinn was one of those children. I also believe that his wife Mary is an IAS reg. I don’t know what happened after John died many years ago, but this family didn’t have much money when he was alive, they were down to earth working class folk. Maybe there was an inheritance? Maybe there was some life insurance? Maybe Mary is such a successful IAS reg and got regged herself for the commissions she earned from regging her ‘selectees’ into bankruptcy. From what I knew of John, he would be rolling in his grave if he knew this sort of shit was going down with his family even though he partook of the Kool-Aid himself.
Mary and Quinn just take their excess commission and it added up to at least 1.5 million. John was a great Craftsman and honorable guy. He was doing auto cad back in dos days. It was a pleasure to know and work with him. He would be shocked and appalled at the level of depravity the cult has fallen down to.
There were truly lots of good people who started with idea that people were worth helping. Used to be a whole delivery team and maybe 1 reg. Now the cult believes in only two things. Money. Control. How times have changed.
Commissions paid will be a net $0, since they’ll immediately go toward the Reg’s next status upgrade. That’s a neat little scam he’s got going there, all paid for by us, the taxpayers.
Is the “Walking Ron’s Journey” merely the cult’s attempt to counter Ted’s “Cult City Tours”?
Interesting fact; the Walker and Tardibuono Family are shown to have donated $250,000. But the family father, OT Forest Tardibuono passed away recently. Did life insurance provide the bucks for this donation?
“Following in Ron’s footsteps” has been around for far longer than the Cult City Tours. It never seemed very popular, judging from the promo I saw for it; depressing promo, as I recall, not at all inviting.
When I was in Scientology, most of the donations were lies. They used various types of scams to make it appear that money was rapidly pouring in. I would suggest that 20% of their announced totals are more realistic.
Has there been a resurrection of the “Postulate Check”? Pledged, but not cashed until some future date?
I;m sure but I have no proof
Those ‘wog’ examples actually meet the grandiose standards of Duggan, who inaccurately compared the banal LRH Hall design to the Taj Mahal and Versailles. Meanwhile Scientology’s concept, like so man other things, appears to be plagiarized from mid-century totalitarianism, in this case Stalinist era East German brutalist style halls like this:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-kulturpalast-the-culture-palace-in-altstadt-dresden-eastern-germany-102656370.html
I think there’s another communist regime performance hall I’ve seen that’s even more of a dead ringer, that I can’t find it right off, but that has the similar large concrete faces like this:
https://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/16271739
Peacemaker, NO one has ever accused “Captain” David MustSavage of being particularly bright. Devious? Perhaps. His fashion/design sense? Brutalist, I’d say.
$137,000,000 for the building. They are probably going to drop another $50,000,000 (total guess) for the audiovisual installation, going by the discussions we were having about it in the late 90s. Similar to the Scientology Media Productions mess but with not as many sound stages.
9 camera shooting with super expensive lighting and recording equipment, sound reinforcement, full editing capability. Probably with live to internet capability too. When we were talking about it the thought was to have satellite uplink capability but they didn’t even do that at SMP. So 90’s!
The idea is to set it up so Dave just has to walk a block or so from his office (or drive in a blacked-out SUV if there are process servers around – maybe a tunnel??), do his thing at the mic and have it broadcast later that night or the next day. Dave micro-manages the scripts and video clips so these would probably be produced on-site as well.
Very expensive but nothing like what it would have been if we had done it 20 years ago!
They probably have the bucks even for that, but as long as there is the slightest chance Dave may get subpoenaed as a witness in any of the court cases going on he won’t be spending any cash on anything else. PIs, lawyers, propaganda and grift, that’s what your fees buy!
A hologram of Dave giving an Introduction To Scientology followed by a 3D movie of Mary Sue auditing Ron on “implants” with special effects would be a good tourist attraction. The movie “The Exorcist” made a ton of money.
I would expect Dave to shoot his Schick green-screen in HIS underground bunker in an undisclosed location Post-production would drop him into the extravaganza.
Jere, you are right that he would love to be able to rake in his mountains of donation cash without ever leaving his heavily fortified, guarded and protected palatial estates.
But you also have to take his monumental ego into account. He gets a real rush from going on the stage to the cheers of thousands, delivering the money lines that trigger the standing ovations, hearing his own voice booming back to him from a large hall. I think someone even tallies up all the applause time and reports it to him.
The trained seals in his picked audience know all about this. They know that when he delivers a pregnant pause after some hyperbolic punch line they are supposed to do a standing ovation. They know it is never best to be the last one to stand up or the first one to stop applauding, so they go on and on with senseless hip-hip-hoorays. Dave beaming the whole time.
When I was setting up his microphone it was nearly impossible to get enough of the sound of his own voice coming back to him without howling feedback. Finally we ended up with thousands of dollars worth of specialized processing equipment and carefully placed monitor speakers. And hyper-cardioid microphones. Nobody could talk him into using in-ear monitors. I think three or four of us ended up with suppressive person declares because we couldn’t make him feel like he was at a Nuremburg rally on stage.
This is the real purpose of the “L Ron Hubbard Hall” – to give him a venue in a protected area with enough of an audience to give him a decent rush when he goes on. They can export their propaganda videos as often as they want with no need to spend millions a year for rental setups in halls around the world that they can no longer fill.
With Scientology there are only two answers to any “why” questions – Money and Dave’s ego.
This is very common practice amongst Cults to create employment opportunities for their members otherwise they shall migrate.
This project say cost 140 million dollar ,shall employ the members as labour , professional , suppliers etc . Inshort atleast 75,% of it goes to them.
This does not stop here , so out of $140, $105 million goes to the members , who in token of appreciation shall pay back ,say 30% as donation.
So , 105×30% = 30million , shall sent back as donation .
And $30 million if employed to some other project , employing the member as supplier and labour would payback $ 4.5 million donation.
In economics this is called multiplier effect where the money keep it self rolling.
This phenomenon continues with the members , as they go to fellow members store for groceries , or hair cut or bear , or bakery , etc etc .
The money rotates 20 times ( average in USA ) between the members and in the local economy.
So keeping in view how powerful phenomenon it is , Cults need it to keep tmembers intact at any geographical location.
This is not first project nor shall be the last in Clear Water .
There were projects in past which let members moved there,now ,they have to be retained by such projects .
However ,it is not a fool proof mechanism. Evey project has to self sufficient to cover it’s running cost and breakeven , if it’s cannot be profitable, like the project under discussion.
The members , sacrificing 30% as donation shall get 15% tax credit , but it is not feasible for low income members, as they shall still be loser.
So its a catch 22 position for Cults , whether they are in Midwest agrarian community or East Coast resort town.
Good observation. For awhile I worked for a Christian family owned construction company and much of their business came from members of their large congregation.
I lived in Salt Lake City for a few years and there was the term “Jack Mormon” for Mormons who didn’t practice Mormonism but remained members in name only for the benefits it provided. Jack Scientologist is a mouthful so UTR (Under The Radar) is an acceptable if less colorful equivalent until someone comes up with something better.
That’s the Clear and Present Danger for the Cults in general and for Scientology in particular.
Those Jack Scientologist may take a U-Turn for class action law suit for being kept under * undue influence” ,which resulted them mental stress and financial loss.
That’s why to all cult groups my advice is to go on isolation in MidWest agrarian community under the lead of ” reincarnated Egyptian king , European dictator or US President ”
A game common amongst Cults, at stage of paranoia ( 2nd last stage) ,people and things slipping from their hand.
Especially when the Supreme leader is Middle school drop out.😂😂😂
How about “Jack Clam”……..lol
Mark, in this case it is a little different.
There will be no high-priced professional editors, cameramen, lighting crew or stage hands raking in union scale cash at this venue. Dave gets all his labor at cost (room and board) from Sea Org volunteers. He will actually save millions every year by cutting out the professionals and rental equipment that were doing these events.
I am sure that lots of the incestuous money laundering you describe does go on in Clearwater, but the L Ron Hubbard Hall probably won’t add much to it.
I am more into macro economic impact as eventually $100 million shall be pumped in Clear Water economy over a period of 3 to 4 years.
On same token taking huge project like this is a big risk , as how much revenue it shall generate .
Otherwise Donors are not from Mars ,they will avoid participating in similar venture in future.
“Otherwise Donors are not from Mars ,they will avoid participating in similar venture in future.”
I beg to differ……..after the donors on the Super Power Building got raked over the coals, you might think they had learned their lesson.
If these figures are accurate that would not seem to be the case.
IIRC, he could hop on a bike and coast down the hill to the hall in a couple of minutes. Tiny Tyrant doesn’t walk anywhere. I’m sure he was driven to the end of the beach were he was “caught” ‘jogging’. His official vehicle was probably no more than 50 feet away any he likely didn’t break a sweat from any exercise.