For the first time: The FBI file of Gabe Cazares, the Clearwater mayor targeted by Scientology

On August 3, 1976, Gabe Cazares, the Texas-born mayor of Clearwater, Florida, contacted the FBI with a complaint about a letter that had been mailed to several Florida Democratic Party officials.

By the summer of 1976, Cazares had been putting up with several months of intense harassment by the Church of Scientology, and he knew immediately that the letter was just the latest “operation” being run against him.

The letter accused him of being a passenger in a car that had been in a hit-and-run accident in Washington DC and had possibly killed someone. The letter writer claimed that she was behind the wheel during the accident, and that Cazares had been “a good guy” about it, but she worried that their secret was going to ruin his political career. The letter hinted that Cazares had been in the car for illicit reasons, which is why he had asked the driver to keep the accident quiet.

When Cazares heard about the letter from a local newspaper reporter, he knew he had to act, and fast.

The FBI investigation which then took place turned out to be a pretty interesting study in chasing down bad leads and then getting stunning information from a key Church of Scientology defector.

And now, for the first time, we have the full story of that investigation — as well as some evidence for why it never resulted in criminal charges being filed.

Thanks to our dogged researcher, R.M. Seibert and her use of the MuckRock website, we now have the Gabe Cazares FBI file, and we’re making it public today.

 
When Cazares died in 2006, this is how the St. Petersburg Times remembered his early life…

Gabriel “Gabe” Cazares was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in Alpine, Texas, one of nine children, and reared in Los Angeles, where he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps. At Los Angeles City College, which he attended on a track scholarship, he set a record for the junior college 2-mile run that stood for 11 years. He also studied at Fresno State College and Texas Christian University, were he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and the University of Maryland. He received a master’s degree in business management from Jackson College in Honolulu. Much of his college work was done in the military. He joined the Army Air Forces in 1941 and rose to lieutenant colonel, retiring from service in 1966 to become a stockbroker. He moved to Clearwater a short time later when, as he once said, “you could count the number of Hispanics on one hand.”

Cazares ran successfully for mayor of Clearwater in 1975, but was already preparing for a run for Congress in 1976 when, early that year, the truth finally came out about a mysterious group that was buying up properties in town.

Calling itself “United Churches of Florida” and “Southern Land Development,” the shadowy group had purchased one of Clearwater’s most well-known landmarks, the Fort Harrison Hotel. The group also bought up the Clearwater Bank building a few blocks away, and other properties.

On a January 26, 1976 radio program, Mayor Cazares wondered why the hotel’s mysterious owners were having it patrolled by security men carrying billy clubs.

Two days later, Scientology finally owned up to being the mysterious group behind “United Churches of Florida” that had purchased the hotel. And its spy wing, the “Guardian’s Office,” began investigating how to smear Cazares with an invented sex scandal.

Details of that plot, named “Operation Italian Fog,” came out in Scientology documents that were seized by the FBI in a 1977 raid. Said one Scientology memo, “The purpose of this op is to actually get real documentation into the files of Mexican license bureau or bureaux stating that the mayor got married in Mexico to some Mexican gal 25 years ago who is not his wife, so puts the mayor in a position of bigamy. This can be accomplished either by a bribe or a covert action. Once the docs are planted it is cleverly exposed that the mayor is promiscuous and a bigamist.”

It’s pretty rich that Scientology dreamed up a plan to frame Gabe Cazares with false documents suggesting that he was a bigamist, since Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was an actual bigamist: He married his second wife, Sara Northrup, in 1946, a year before he obtained a divorce from his first wife, Polly Grubb.

The Guardian’s Office planned other schemes to ruin Cazares, with names like “Operation Cazares Handling,” “Operation Speedy Gonzales,” and “Project Taco-Less.” But its plan to involve him in a hit-and-run accident was perhaps its most elaborate.

Let’s examine it by starting where the FBI file does, and that’s with Cazares making his report to law enforcement.

“On August 3, 1976, victim, who is a Democratic candidate for Florida’s 6th Congressional District, made a personal complaint alleging that an unknown number of letters postmarked July 28, 1976 from Washington D.C., had been mailed to various executives of the Democratic Party in Florida. Cazares furnished a copy of these letters to the FBI.”

The letter ended up in the hands of reporters, who asked Cazares about it. Here’s that letter…

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I am writing this letter in an attempt to resolve a serious problem I am faced with, and am hoping I can count on you for help. I am sending this letter to other Democratic organizations in the Clearwater area as I’m not sure which Congressional district Gabe Cazares is running in.

In March of this year, I met Gabe while he was here in Washington for a convention. We spent most of a very enjoyable evening together, dining and talking.

I am not going to get into a big thing here about the morality of whether or not my relationship with a married man is right or wrong, as I know only that I enjoyed myself with him. This is not the main issue but has some bearing on it.

While driving around that night sightseeing with Gabe, we had an accident. We hit a man going around a sharp curve in the road, and did not stop to see if he was hurt or even dead. I don’t know why, I only know that I was scared to death, and panicked — I guess we both did.

Now, Gabe has been very good about this. He did not turn me in to the police, and when I called him later to talk about the accident, he advised me to get a lawyer and said that he would back up me totally.

Since the accident, however, I have had constant nightmares which are horrible, and I’m a nervous wreck. I do not eat well and have lost almost 20 pounds. I decided to go to an analyst about this as I couldn’t live with myself, nor could I face the publicity and degradation of turning myself into the police. With the help of my analyst, I have finally decided that the best action is to turn myself into the police and rid myself of the self reciminations and guilt, but this is where my problem comes in.

I hold a sensitive government position which is obviously jeopardized by this situation. I realize that going to the police will also mean the end of my job. As you may know, the newspapers are going crazy here in D.C. with sex scandals and other kinds of scandals with government officials. I wouldn’t want this to come out as a scandal in the press. I certainly do not want to involve Gabe in a thing like this as it would only be trouble for him as Mayor and I now understand he is running for Congress. Just what the press wants is another Congressional scandal. Gabe doesn’t deserve this, and I don’t think I could go through one if it occurred. I’d rather die.

Gabe is such a good guy and so straight-forward that I know that he’ll tell me to just do what I have to and he’ll back me up, but I can’t face being smeared in the press. He is much stronger than I am. That is why I’m writing to you. I don’t think Gabe would bother to protect himself. He’d take it on the chin and fight hard, but the press in D.C. is vicious.

Maybe if you got together with Gabe and he told you the whole story you could figure out a way to prevent this possible catastrophe. I don’t know if there is anything that you can do to protect both of us in this matter, but I know that political people can often help or come up with some kind of strategy to figure out a way out of this kind of predicament. Gabe’s a good man and he doesn’t deserve to have his political career put in jeopardy or ruined because of one stupid mistake, and I would die if I were in the press like some of the Capitol Hill girls are.

Gabe knows who I am and I’m sure he’d appreciate knowing that things were alright before I go to the police. I will contact Gabe to find out what I should do after you’ve had some time to discuss this with him.

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Sharon T.

The FBI met with Cazares to get his version of the story. According to the FBI file, here’s what Cazares told them.

He had flown from Tampa to DC on a red eye that had arrived at Friendship Airport at 4 am on Sunday, March 14. He took a cab to the Dupont Circle Motel as he prepared to attend a national mayors’ conference.

Later that day, he got a call from a reporter, asking to interview him as a “minority” mayor at the conference. Cazares agreed to meet him in the motel lobby at 4 pm.

When the reporter arrived, Cazares asked him for his credentials, but the “reporter” said he had left them at home. While they were talking, a woman approached them and joined in the conversation. Then the reporter left and Gabe continued to talk to the woman before he went back to his room, alone.

He returned to the motel lobby later, between 6 and 7 pm, and saw that the woman was still in the lobby, using a telephone. He described the woman as about 5-foot-5, with brown hair and grey streaks.

She offered to give him a ride to the conference at the Continental Hilton Hotel, and to show him around the city on the way. During the tour, they stopped in Arlington to have dinner and then ended up back at Gabe’s motel, where the woman made a phone call. Then she continued to drive him, and this time went through Rock Creek Park.

As they rounded a bend in the road, “Cazares heard a thump in the vicinity of the rear of the driver’s side of the car.”

The woman said she had hit something, and Cazares said he told her to stop the car. But she worried about losing her license, and said for the first time that she worked at the Pentagon. She then drove back to his motel.

They talked about whether she had actually hit something or someone, but she said that she wasn’t going to take any chances, and would not be reporting it to the police.

Cazares flew back to Tampa the next afternoon.

Three days later, a woman called Clearwater City Hall and at Cazares’s house, asking for him. She eventually reached him while he was at a friend’s house. She asked him if he had gone to the police about the accident. When he asked her for her phone number, she refused, saying, “The man I live with would kill me.”

Cazares later got a call from Clearwater Sun reporter Steve Advokat that he had received the strange July 28 letter from “Sharon T.”

Cazares told the FBI that he didn’t suspect that his Republican opponent, Congressman C.W. “Bill” Young, had anything to do with the letter, and he assumed that it was a frame job by the Church of Scientology.

The FBI, after deciding that the case fell under its jurisdiction because Cazares was a Congressional candidate, began trying to figure out who was “Sharon T.”

Based on a tip that Cazares got from an attorney, the FBI started to build a complex case against a woman named Sharon Tuttle, whom they believed might have been put up to the job by a man named Patrick Buckley, described in the file as “a radical member of the Church of Scientology.”

But after expending significant resources exploring that theory, the FBI had little solid evidence to back it up.

And that’s because they were looking in the wrong place.

In June 1977, a Guardian’s Office spy named Michael Meisner escaped from his Scientology handlers and turned himself over to the FBI. What he revealed resulted in what became the largest FBI raid in the agency’s history, which took place on July 8, 1977. (For much more about Meisner and the massive operation to infiltrate the federal government he helped run, the Snow White Program, see our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.)

On August 4, Meisner got around to telling the FBI about the hit-and-run scheme against Gabe Cazares.

[Michael Meisner], who is undergoing intensive debriefing by the Los Angeles Division, advised on August 4, 1977, that in March 1976, he was involved in a Scientology covert operation to discredit Mayor Gabriel Cazares of Clearwater, Florida. He advised that Sharon Thomas, who was operating as a Scientology plant in the office of Paul Figley, [assistant US Attorney], Washington, D.C., was to arrange to be “picked up” by Cazares when the latter attended a mayor’s conference in Washington D.C. Thomas was to have dinner with Cazares and thereafter drive aimlessly around D.C., supposedly showing Cazares the sights. Thomas was then to drive through a darkened area where he, Meisner, was to be stationed and upon signal, he would stage being hit by Thomas’ car. Thomas would flee the scene and thereafter was to telephonically contact Cazares to remind him of the accident and the “handle” that Thomas had on him. [Meisner] stated that the operation went off exactly as planned with Thomas utilizing a red sportscar owned by Pat Weisner, Scientology secretary in D.C. as the hit and run vehicle with the “accident” taking place in an unrecalled D.C. park area. [Meisner] advised that he is not aware of any letters having been sent to the Pinellas County Democratic Party concerning the “accident,” however, he advised that he was not privy to the entire Cazares program, only that portion which was to take place in Washington, D.C. [Meisner] concluded by stating that the Cazares program was drafted by Mitchell Herman[n], Scientologist and southeast directorate and approved by Dick Weigand, Deputy Guardian for Information US. For the information of WFO, Meisner advised that Sharon Thomas, prior to her employment by the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C., worked for the U.S. Coast Guard in their intelligence office in D.C. as a secretary and utilized the code name Ursula. [Meisner] stated that to the best of his knowledge, Thomas commenced employment at the Coast Guard in December 1974.

“Sharon T.” turned out to be a Scientology spy, Sharon Thomas, who had obtained positions at both the US Coast Guard and the US Attorney’s office in Washington in these heady days when Scientology’s ambition for infiltrating the federal government knew no bounds.

Two weeks later, on August 19, 1977, Meisner was interviewed again about the Cazares incident.

He said that he had received a call from Guardian’s Office executive Mitchell Hermann in March 1976, and that Hermann had told him to call back from a pay phone.

The original plan, Meisner said, was to put together a child-sized dummy for the car to hit. Then they would torment Cazares about running over a child with phone calls.

Meisner talked over the plan with another operative, Rick Kimmel, and they decided it would be hard to make a convincing child dummy. They decided to use a live person, and they looked for a spot to do it.

Meisner and Kimmel rehearsed the accident several times, with Kimmel driving and Meisner stepping out in front of the car. Then they called Hermann, who approved the new plan.

Hermann suggested using Sharon Thomas for the driver of the car. Kimmel borrowed a sports car from Pat Weisner and paid her $10.

Then they got operatives Bruce Ullman and Joe Alesi involved. Ullman would park in a certain spot, and when Sharon passed him, he would speed up and overtake her, driving by the spot where Meisner was waiting in the park. When he saw Ullman drive by, Meisner would know that he had a few seconds for Sharon’s car to arrive.

After the fake accident, it was Ullman who would pick up Meisner, and they would follow Sharon back to Cazares’s motel.

It was another Guardian’s Office operative, Joe Lisa, who obtained Cazares’s flight information, and Meisner and Kimmel kept him under tight surveillance to find out where he was staying.

It was Joe Alesi who called and pretended to be a reporter, asking Cazares for an interview.

Sharon Thomas was given money to purchase some “sexy” clothes for the operation. And she made sure to be in the motel’s lobby bar before Cazares and Alesi met at 4 pm. Meisner said it was Cazares who invited Thomas to join them. He also claimed that Cazares had invited Thomas up to his room, but she declined.

When it came time for the accident, “Meisner stepped onto the road from the shoulder and leaned into the sports car, screaming and hitting it with his forearm. Upon making impact, Meisner spun around and fell to the road screaming.”

He cut his knee and was bleeding.

They all met up afterward. Thomas claimed that Cazares had been making advances before the accident but not afterward.

Alesi wrote under the name “Joe Harris” for a small newspaper called the Washington Informer, and he wrote a column complaining about people who travel on the taxpayer dime and then don’t do their work. He wrote that he had looked for Clearwater Mayor Gabe Cazares, but couldn’t find him at the conference.

Hermann sent copies of the article to reporters at the Clearwater Sun, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Tampa Tribune, Meisner said.

And with Meisner present and taping, Thomas made the numerous phone calls to Cazares’s office and home.

Several months after the interview with Meisner, in a memo dated January 4, 1978, the FBI was attempting to gather more evidence about Joe Alesi and the other participants in the scheme, but warned that “all of the above deals with sensitive information concerning the COS [Church of Scientology], which has in the past attempted to infiltrate the FBI.”

Meanwhile, Sharon Thomas was one of nine defendants who were being prosecuted by the Justice Department for their roles in Scientology’s “Snow White Program,” and which focused on Guardian’s Office activity in the nation’s capital. One of those defendants was L. Ron Hubbard’s own wife, Mary Sue Hubbard. (Two more defendants were extradited from England.) From 1974 to the raid in 1977, Guardian’s Office spies had been infiltrating and breaking into federal agencies in DC, pulling out documents about Scientology by the yard, a complex operation that L. Ron Hubbard himself had dreamed up while he was hiding out in a Queens apartment in 1973.

Documents in the Cazares file indicate that the Snow White prosecution took precedence and was eating up an enormous amount of resources and legal work — the lead prosecutor in Washington, Ray Banoun, kept canceling scheduled trips to Tampa to work with the prosecutors there who were trying to build a separate case against Thomas and others in the hit-and-run operation.

Also, the file suggests, the FBI was a little freaked out as the investigations dragged on. A September 1979 memo lists a number of incidents suggesting that more than two years after the big raid, Scientology was still burglarizing and surveilling, and possibly trying to sabotage the FBI and Justice Department:

— A source told Tampa FBI agents that Scientology kept sensitive documents in Clearwater, but were planning to move them to Los Angeles in anticipation of another raid.

— The New York FBI office reported “several unauthorized entrances or break-ins” as it was trying to put together its own case against the Guardian’s Office, presumably regarding the treatment of author Paulette Cooper. Confidential information about a prosecutor working that case was obtained from Columbia University, and the FBI didn’t know why.

— Documents that Cooper had given a New York Times reporter went missing, even after the reporter stored them in a locked cabinet at the newspaper. The reporter’s apartment had also been broken into.

— The FBI was tipped to a particular safety deposit box at the Tampa airport, and when they picked up a Scientologist, Douglas Rehm, who retrieved something from it, it turned out to be what appeared to be a burglary kit.

— Firefighters who responded to a small blaze at the Fort Harrison Hotel found “sophisticated communications equipment in the area of the fire.”

— A Motorola employee in Phoenix reported to the FBI that Clearwater Scientologists were inquiring about commercial “data encryption equipment,” asking to lease six units of the equipment at $3,500 each.

The memo concludes, “The above information has been furnished because there seems to be a number of indications that Church of Scientology personnel may very well be continuing to commit burglaries and, most particularly, continuing the theft of Government documents, possibly including classified military documents. Additionally, for whatever reason, they appear to have embraced sophisticataed communications technology to render their activities more secure.”

While the Snow White defendants were being prosecuted, a number of others were named as unindicted co-conspirators — including L. Ron Hubbard himself.

In Cazares’s file, however, there’s a suggestion that direct evidence of Hubbard’s involvement in the Cazares operation might make him vulnerable to charges. And that involved testimony from a young former Sea Org “Messenger,” Tonja Burden.

“[Tonja] Burden was reportedly privy to the conversation in which COS founder L. Ron Hubbard attempted to secure the services of a private detective agency to surveil Cazares as part of their plan to discredit their most outspoken critic in Clearwater,” the file says.

Another case the Tampa FBI and prosecutors wanted to put before a grand jury involved Scientology spy Merrell Vannier.

At one point Cazares hired Vannier, who was a lawyer, to represent him in a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, not realizing that Vannier had actually been volunteering as a Guardian’s Office spy for several years.

As Vannier himself pointed out in his 2015 book, Arrows in the Dark, he used his position as Cazares’s attorney to wreak havoc on Scientology’s other enemies, including Toronto grandmother Nan McLean, who entrusted a document trove to Vannier that then mysteriously went missing.

Once the truth was revealed shortly after the 1977 raid that Vannier was actually the Scientology spy code named “Ritz,” he ditched Clearwater for Los Angeles, and Tampa prosecutors began putting together a criminal case against him.

While investigating Vannier, they learned that he had applied to work for the FBI on March 21, 1975. But his background check revealed that his brother, Harold Jr., was a member of the Communist Party, and so they figured Merrell would be a “potential security problem” and didn’t hire him.

Vannier refused to testify to a Tampa grand jury that was empaneled to investigate Scientology’s various Florida schemes. His wife, Francine, and Mitchell Hermann were charged with contempt when they refused to answer the grand jury’s questions, and it was upheld all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Ultimately, Merrell Vannier was not indicted by the grand jury for working as Cazares’s attorney while he was spying for the church. He was disbarred for it, however.

(We were critical of Vannier’s book, which tried to make the case that Cazares was working with the FBI all along in order to entrap Merrell — an astounding claim that came with no evidence. The book also didn’t mention the verdict of the Florida Bar, which disbarred Vannier. And we don’t remember him mentioning that he failed to infiltrate the FBI because of his brother’s association with the Communist Party. We sent him an email asking about that, but he didn’t get back to us.)

While the prosecution against Vannier foundered, the hit-and-run case was also running into more delays.

“Prosecution of this case has been stymied by jurisdictional problems and turnover in Justice Department personnel. USA, Tampa, however, vitally interested in this case,” the file says.

Ultimately, no one faced criminal charges over the hit-and-run plot. Why? The file suggests that Michael Meisner insisted that Ray Banoun, the Snow White prosecutor, had told him he wouldn’t have to testify in any other case after the Snow White trial was over. And Meisner held them to that. And so as long as Meisner wouldn’t testify in Tampa, they couldn’t bring additional charges against Sharon Thomas or the others who had helped target the Clearwater mayor.

For her part in the Snow White Program itself, Thomas was found guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison and served six months. The ten other defendants were also found guilty, and received sentences of four to five years and served prison time. Mary Sue Hubbard served a year of her five-year sentence at a federal penitentiary.

Cazares lost his run for Congress in 1976 and then resigned as mayor in 1978. But he served as a county commissioner from 1980 to 1984 and then ran unsuccessfully one more time for Congress in 1986. He was involved in several lawsuits against the Church of Scientology, and the last of them was settled in 1986.

He continued to speak out about Scientology for the rest of his life.

In 2000, Cazares addressed the Clearwater City Commission as a private citizen, responding to a suggestion that people who opposed the Church of Scientology were out-of-towners who were not good for the city.

I remember standing before the City Hall flag pole in 1979 proclaiming that Clearwater was not for sale at any price. I was wrong. As of last October the Scientologists own more than 37 properties in Clearwater….The long-existing coalition of Scientologists, City of Clearwater officials, zoning lawyers and the Greater Clearwater Chamber of Commerce has now been confirmed without commission or media objection. Only…the true citizens in Clearwater can put an end to this unholy alliance.

“Scientology didn’t give up on Gabe at any time even when they were done with the litigation,” says Robert Peterson, who got to know Cazares through the Lisa McPherson Trust at the turn of the century. “While many have been persecuted by Scientology, few had received their attention for a longer period of time. As Ray Emmons observed, as we were watching Gabe get into his car after a meeting, ‘He’s an old war-horse, he’ll never give up.’ I think Gabe would have agreed with that as his epitaph.”

 
Here’s the FBI file itself. Happy hunting…

Gabe Cazares FBI File by Tony Ortega on Scribd

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 12, 2017 at 07:00

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Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2016 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2016), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | Scientology boasts about assistance from Google | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
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