Inside the 'bromance' of Tom Cruise and Scientology leader David Miscavige: How they gamble and smoke cigars together and share a special language - but Miscavige secretly recorded the movie star

Daily Mail, UK/December 2, 2015

By Chris White

This is the Tom Cruise the world does not see.

The cigar-chomping gambler who speaks in a special Scientology language, was so hell bent on impressing David Beckham that he got Sea Org members to laser level a field at Scientology headquarters to turn it into a perfect soccer field and has enjoyed a 30-year 'bromance' with church leader David Miscavige is described in unprecedented interviews with former members of Cruise's religion.

Scientologists who have left the church have come forward to offer their own insights and observations about the actor's world in the wake of actress Leah Remini's revelations about Cruise in her new autobiography.

In exclusive interviews with Daily Mail Online ex-Scientologists including the ex-head of security Gary Morehead; former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder; Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard's great-grandson; and the former personal chef to church leader David Miscavige tell about Cruise's life and relationship with the church, his ex-wives Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes - and his tight-knit relationship with Miscavige, 55.

The interviews off insight into the closed world in which Cruise lives, shielded from the outside world by the church and spending huge amounts of time at Gold Base, the headquarters of the religion.

He has been honored with a villa there beside that of Miscavige - just yards away from the house built for the 'return' of L Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction author who founded Scientology and who followers believe will come again in a new body.

Gary Morehead was head of security at Gold Base, Scientology headquarters in Hemet, California, for seven years and a Sea Org member from the age of 13.

Now 49, he is an ex-member who used to be in charge of Tom's personal security and saw his coming and goings. - usually in a helicopter.

Cruise, now 53, and best friend Miscavige had just come back to Scientology HQ from a crazy party weekend in Las Vegas, says Morehead, and sat in their exclusive lounge and puffing away on the finest Cuban cigars.

They threw down their winnings - bundles of cash so big, one hand wasn't enough to hold them.

Church members looked on in amazement; they were part of the ultra-dedicated Sea Org but earning pennies in return for 'harsh' working conditions.

'I know a couple of times he and Dave went to Vegas,' says Morehead, 'they'd go out gambling because I saw the big rolls of cash that were sitting on the table up at the Officers' Lounge in the "Star of California".' The Star of California is the name for the hang-out area for high-ranking church members.

'I knew that they had just come back and I asked about what was all that cash, and was told by Tom's steward: 'Yes, that's what Dave and Tom brought back, they just won that.'

'There were two rolls – really huge fat rolls – so fat you couldn't hold them in your hands. A significant amount of cash, as they were $100 bills.

'I understood it to be about thirty or forty thousand dollars each. I was told that one was Dave's and one was Tom's and it was what they won in Vegas. I was shocked they even went. It was shortly after Days of Thunder.

'Dave would go and have fun with Tom, it was really odd. I thought:"'It's gambling, you know, here we are in a church, that's weird." But if anyone can break the rules, Number One and Two can. It's a real bromance between them. They do everything together - exercise and cigar smoke together.'

For months on end, Cruise was - and sometimes still is - holed up at the Hemet headquarters, around 60 miles from the star's Hollywood Hills mansion.

Gold Base became Tom's 'home from home' when he was working his way through the levels necessary to move up the Scientology ladder, called Operating Thetan (OT) courses.
Desperate to get his good friend David Beckham and his family to the base, he went to extraordinary levels to impress him.

'The Beckhams were due to come, but they never did. They leveled a field. You know the guys even learned about how to put patterns in the grass and stuff like that so it looked really well groomed.

'I can only assume he was getting him into Scientology. What was Lisa Marie Presley doing with Michael Jackson? She was getting him into Scientology.'

Tom's former personal chef Sinar Parman tells the same story. He was in the Sea Org for 23 years. Now 60, he's been out of it since 2001, but still has links to people in the church.

He adds: 'They'd do everything for Tom. They had the whole field laser leveled out because he was friends with Beckham, but he never showed up. They built tennis courts and they hired a top tennis pro ready to give Tom lessons or play with him. He was Scientology royalty.'

David Miscavige has been by Tom's side for the last thirty years - the best man at both his weddings to Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes.

But it's their behavior on base that shocked staff, as the men competed to 'out-macho' each other right down to their accents.

'Tom would come out with all this stuff. He would talk to DM [David Miscavige] in this crazy way, his mannerisms were just unreal, all this tech speak,' says Parman. 'He would speak like the inner culture of Scientology, that's the way you speak if you're a complete Sci fanatic. He would pride himself on speaking in those buzz words.

'DM and Tom would socialize all the time. They would just hang around with each other in the evenings, go out to the lounge where there's more comfortable chairs. DM's got this huge cigar humidor in the lounge, which is just a pretense for Cruise. They'd be smoking away.

'I offered DM a cigar when Cruise wasn't there and he said: "I don't even like those things, you can still smell them three days later."

'It was a bromance - cigar-smoking, playing tennis, doing exercise together, out macho-ing each other. He even got DM parachuting with him, there's a big place in Perris, CA where they did it. It was who could outdo the other.'

Miscavige and Tom would drive around in customized motorcycles and cars. Miscavige is a dog lover and has five on base.

Parman verified that not only did he keep dogs, but there was a million dollar facelift for the property, which included air-conditioned kennels.

Only Miscavige - and Tom - are allowed to use the kennels. The likes of Kirstie Alley and John Travolta never had that privilege, according to ex-members, even though 'Kirstie brought in some kind of a small marsupial, a deal she had with San Diego Zoo', says Parman.

But underneath their supposedly close relationship, unbeknownst to Tom, his moves were being recorded.

Tom was being audited with two cameras - one he knew about, the other he didn't, claims Gary Morehead,  head of security, who says he personally put the secret camera in the room.

He explains: 'I know that there were two camera systems for Cruise – one was a camera he did know about - a JVC camera on a tripod - which made him believe that was it.

'But I had to set up a second camera in Tom's auditing room. That was for Dave's own personal entertainment although it was meant to be for the purpose of being professionally critiqued.

'It was Dave's little secret to look inside people's little sessions. If Tom ever wanted that tape, Dave would still have the other one.

'I started installing these secret surveillance systems – hidden camera systems where Tom and other staff had no idea they were being watched, recorded and reported.

'Dave started discovering that you could view these cameras from anywhere as long as you had a modem. So we would set up these systems to survey our own staff and he could watch them from anywhere.
'Dave would do that as well for John Travolta and other celebrities. John came out of a session one day and he walked up by the office and a bunch of people were in looking in on it.

'He hit the roof, it really pissed him off. He knew they were looking at him as the picture on the screen was of his auditing room. It was a very big flap internally, a lot of people got in trouble.
'It was all justified because it was in-house and it wasn't considered a crime.'

Founder L. Ron Hubbard's great-grandson Jamie De Wolf, 37, now a successful stand-up comedian, has no doubt that Cruise is still being watched: 'They watch Cruise like a hawk, there's no doubt, they have all his records, they know his secrets. They know all of it.'

Tom and Nicole would often come to base, along with their adopted children Isabella and Connor, and stay in a luxury villa next door to Miscavige.

Nicole got to the Operating Thetan Level II (OTII), which is still extremely high for any Scientologist, according to former Church spokesman Mike Rinder.

'Nicole was there, but for a much shorter period of time than he was. She was doing courses up to OTII. They used to bring the kids and they bought some mini motorcycles so that Connor could ride around on them,' says Rinder.

Morehead says that during the early nineties, Nicole would be there for days or weeks at a time. He explains: 'Nicole was there as much as Tom along with the kids. They used to get off the helicopter together or sometimes they would show up separately. The kids were really young.

'They would come all the time, and for at least a week at a time, maybe a month. I knew the helicopter pilots pretty well by the end of it. West Coast Helicopters out of Van Nuys Airport, whatever Tom wanted, they'd provided it.

'Honda motorbikes were given to Tom and Nicole so that they could get around the property.'
Nicole would get special treatment from Tom and Miscavige who made sure she was 'alright'.
There's a story that Miscavige heard that Cruise had a fantasy of running with Kidman through a meadow full of wildflowers, so he ordered Sea Org members to plant an area of the compound, which can be seen for the first time in Daily Mail Online's exclusive pictures. It  is now just wasteland.
'Tom got a Porsche Ferrara for Nicole for Valentine's Day and it was delivered to the property by a tow company in Los Angeles. When they pulled up to the gate and said we have a delivery for Tom Cruise, I couldn't believe it.
'Dave used to look after her, make sure she was alright. She was on courses, being audited, it was all kept very sheltered from the rest of the staff.

'You could not go to the areas where they were going to be such as the L. Ron Hubbard Music Studio and the Ranchos, which was where he was auditing.

'The kids would just be hanging out with Nicole, near the Star of California, known as 'The Ship,' in the pool. They would come and go. The place wasn't set up to entertain kids.'

Chef Parman ended up catering for Nicole and Tom's wedding in 1990 and said Nicole was a nightmare because she never ate on base.

Parman says: 'The only one I didn't know was Nicole, she didn't speak, she was very, very quiet, even though I would see her every day. She ate so very little, barely anything some days, so it was impossible to tell what she liked or didn't like.

'She was a bit spooked out, freaked out by it all. She had a little pasta, boiled eggs, toast, but hardly anything.'

Tom has used Gold Base since the late Eighties, completing his Operating Thetan courses at the base and spending months studying.

Now that he's at the highest level - Operating Thetan VIII - he uses the base to hang out or get extensively audited.

Chef Parman describes Tom's typical day when he was studying, saying: 'He was on a nine to five schedule of study when he was at base, he was there for a specific reason. He would be on course and getting audited.

'He did Key to Life, Life Orientation, then he did the OT Levels 0, I, II, III and IV. He'd be there every day for months. He'd study in the L. Ron Hubbard Studio, where there's a music room, green room and conference room.

'There's another place called the Ranchos which would be his auditing room. He'd stay at the G Units, which is the VIP units across the street. He had one of those and his assistant stayed in another.
'There was also an exercise room, which was exclusively for David Miscavige, but Tom was allowed to use it. In the morning, he'd exercise and he'd be talking to Hollywood all the time.

'Then sometimes he'd have to be off to get his teeth done, so a helicopter would land, get him to his dentist, then he'd come back.'

Former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder says: 'At times, he was there pretty routinely, he would just sort of show up at the house. He would be there for a considerable length of time, days or weeks, and everybody had to call him "Sir" and everybody had to smile.

'There wasn't to be anything that would give him the impression that this was anything other than the ideal, perfect, most wonderful place in the world.'

Parman adds: 'As Tom became more important, the villas were used for Cruise when he was in town.

'DM had to get outside contractors to change them to luxury villas. The middle villa is where Cruise and family stayed like Katie Holmes, Suri, his other two kids, sisters, mom and step-dad.

'At the Star of California, I served the whole family at Thanksgiving. He ate a lot of pasta, Italian foods, no particular favorites, he liked chow mien, a bit of sushi. I'd just alternate so it wasn't the same. There were no puddings.

'He was also smoking cigars like they were going out of fashion, he'd have four or five Montecristo No 2s, torpedo shapes. He'd pop one after his meal. He would give me a couple of Cuban cigars every week or so. They were awesome.'

Morehead says that, as the years went by, Tom was good with the staff and even arranged wild Mission Impossible-style rides on his private helicopters.'

'Tom was good, he would give us gifts, he would organize rides for me to fly around the park and he would tell the pilot to give us a real rocking ride. It was quite a memory, it was the same pilots who flew the helicopters in The Terminator films and he'd do the same sort of stunts,' he adds.

Now Tom has his own office and staff and dedicated Sea Org members to look after his every whim from an in-house counselor to an assistant washing and waxing his cars all day long.

Parman says: 'He was being loved. There were people working for him. If he needs cigars, anything, he can get it. He had an assistant, and a couple of people underneath them, plus a driver.

'Tom has his own office and staff, and when he did his Life Orientation Course, he decided to rearrange his office, so DM got the Feshbach brothers introduced to him, so they could talk to him about his investments.

'They were Sea Org members and investment bankers. Tom would have an investment account with the Feshbach brothers with it obviously having Scientology's best interest at heart.

'A lot of staff took care of him, there were supervisors brought in even in-house counselors,' adds Morehead. 'His car was taken care of by John Brosseau, he'd wax it all the time and change the oil.

'That was done at the Church's expense. He'd have certain staff and auditors. It was important that he kept a low profile to make sure that that outside people had no idea that he was there. I had security so well even Dave wasn't concerned about any threats.'

While Cruise and Miscavige would be smoking cigars in their private lounge or driving motorbikes around the estate, Sea Org members would be living in questionable conditions.

Several members have fled from the base and told stories about the long working hours for pennies an hour and some executives, such as Mike Rinder, were punished and sent to 'The Hole,' a slang term for high ranking staff who've fallen out of favor and find themselves confined to the facility for months or even years.
The Hole was built only a few yards away from the L. Ron Hubbard Music Studio where Tom would study and do his auditing training although officially The Hole came after he finished his studying.
After all the recent stories and revelations about Scientology, former members are flabbergasted that Tom can still be best friends with David Miscavige.
Morehead says: 'I understand the Tom Cruise Wow Factor and that sells, but how can Tom Cruise not know about this s***? How can you not know what the guy that you go gambling with is doing.'
Rinder, who says he spent almost two years in The Hole, says: 'I am sure he used to think this Scientology is wonderful, isn't it? I'm sure he probably still says the same thing.

'But I am sure that some of the problems are seeping into his world although I have no idea what his real view of it is.'

Jamie De Wolf says that it's impossible for Cruise to ever leave, he's in it for life. 'He would be the ultimate member to defect, that would be huge, but I don't think it would happen.

'I know people who have worked with Cruise and he's in it for life. Imagine if you were Tom Cruise - to admit to yourself that you were wrong, it's a huge blowout. To admit that you'd been hoaxed, that would be very hard to accept.'

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