Mike Silverman: A popular figure in Scientology, an enigmatic figure after leaving

Ron Kasman, a longtime Underground Bunker community member and contributor, has written for us about his journey into and out of Scientology, and his life as a comics creator. He was kind enough to send us this remembrance of his cousin, Mike Silverman, who was very well known in Scientology and had become less visible after leaving it.

He was Mike when he was in Scientology. He was Michael to his old friends and family. He passed away July 11 at age 80 from causes unknown to me.

For Michael there were 23 years pre-Scientology, 23 years with Scientology and then the dream suddenly came to an end.

Many of you knew him during the Scientology period but that is when I knew him least. I rarely saw him because he was busy helping Ron clear the planet.

Michael was my charming cousin. Even in his teens he was a brilliant card magician but no one watched Michael just to see his sleight of hand. They watched so they could listen to his patter. The card tricks were his excuse to engage with the audience. He was as funny as any one I have ever met and I include professional comedians. As a magician he became familiar with the stage but he tried acting only once. Two friends saw him and told me, “He stole the show”.

Michael would have been successful in any area that required personality, intelligence and hard work. At age 23 Michael was a title searcher, an occupation that was part of the buying and selling of real estate, now replaced by computers. He was good at his job and made a lot of money. I remember him driving around Toronto in his Lotus Spider. He sold that car to buy services soon after he was introduced to Scientology.

He joined staff and soon became the golden boy at the Toronto Org. He brought me in as well as several other friends and family members. He told me that the surge in business at the Toronto Org was his doing. He had a large circle of friends and was able to get just about all of them downtown for the personality test. Everyone loved Michael.

The Los Angeles organization beckoned. I know little about what happened in LA because I saw him only four times over those twenty plus years. Once he came back to Toronto to handle his father after his father called the police. What father wouldn’t? Michael had been out of contact for months. Then there was the death of his sister where, though devastated, he quipped, “We come; we go”. Those words continue to comfort me. They comfort me now. He visited the old crowd another time when he returned to Toronto to speak and raise funds for the cult. He introduced us, then, to his first wife, Pat. He returned again when his father died which is when many of us met his second wife, Ruthie. Though they eventually divorced and Ruthie predeceased him, Michael spoke of her lovingly for the rest of his life.

Then one day in 1991 Michael returned to Toronto. He drove 3,000 miles in a beat up, yellow Mustang. He was just about broke. After all those years working for the benefit of Scientology, raising, he said, sixty to eighty million dollars, they finally figured out that he was a suppressive and gave him the old heave-ho. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Michael looked like hell and I don’t just mean the normal changes we go through in aging. He had lost most of his curly hair and the little left was grey, too long and combed back. His gums were receding and his teeth were yellow. He chain smoked and his complexion reflected it.

He was put up by a caring family member whom he had at one time brought into Scientology but who had long since walked away. While living in his basement, Michael waited for the call from Scientology saying that they had made a mistake, that they needed him and they wanted him to return to his former position. The call never came. Then, over the next three months our mutual cousin deprogrammed him by asking Michael, an OT5, to demonstrate the superpowers that L.Ron claimed he had. And he gave Michael a critical book to read. Michael began to come around. Then Michael visited an old friend who had become a dentist and got his mouth fixed up. He quit smoking. He dyed his remaining hair black. And then he bought a toupee, the standard rat-crawled-up-on-your-head-and-died model. He looked really weird but he also looked younger.

He got a job selling diamonds. Soon he had an apartment and a new car. In his own words, he had “established himself”.

One day he gave a group of us a short talk. “My past has been erased… But my life isn’t bad. I am thirty-one again,” he said, though he was forty-six. He emphasized, “I am not kidding. I am thirty-one. The last time I bought myself a shirt or a pair of socks was when I was thirty-one. I haven’t read a newspaper or gone out to a movie since I was thirty-one. I have a whole world to explore”.

I googled his name on the internet. Some of his associates believed that he was found suppressive because he was acting fast and loose with cult finances. Michael told me otherwise. He told me that his cult office was losing money and heads were going to roll. Into the basket would fall not just the head of the person at fault but his supervisor, his supervisor’s supervisor and so on up the pyramid. Michael was powerful enough to be scapegoated for the financial loss but he was also off the pyramid. No higher-ups would suffer. Michael also said that he had found a glitch in the computer program that did the billing. People had been overcharged for services. He phoned these people, told them that they had extra money on account and convinced them to spend the money on more services. I suspect the controversy sits on that point and any commission that he may have received.

A few years ago I spoke to Spanky Taylor. She confirmed Michael’s version. She also said that it sent a shock wave through people doing similar work. If they would do that to Michael, she felt, Scientology could scapegoat the rest of them too.

Michael wrote up a lengthy description of his experiences in Scientology and the things he was accused of for Mike Rinder’s blog in 2017. It’s worth going over again, especially if you remember him in Scientology.

Soon after returning to Toronto, Michael met a person whom he could care about and they moved in together. They started a successful catering company. They worked hard, bought a house and even built a swimming pool in their backyard. They enjoyed entertaining their friends and family. Then, perhaps a decade ago, they both retired and moved to a small town in Nova Scotia. That friend contracted multiple sclerosis and died about a year ago. We come; we go.

Michael very rarely spoke of Scientology during the last two decades, except to say that he was over it. Really, though, it had some long lasting effects. He continued to distrust teachers, journalists, industrialists, doctors, politicians and courts well beyond the healthy skepticism many people have for our institutions. He believed the claims of quack medics and at-the-edge nutritionists. His doctor was a Scientologist and his chiropractor used Scientology techniques. He planned to use the sauna and niacin method to detox himself and his partner until another friend talked him out of it. He believed he had a superpower, the ability to find lost possessions through astral travel. He believed that once he had met up with the soul of a dead woman and brought her back to life by telling her to return to her body. He believed that Ingo Swann had superpowers too, but he acknowledged that the other OTs he knew did not.

Could it be that as a magician he was good at fooling people but also came to believe that he, himself, couldn’t be fooled? If so, when the conmen came around he didn’t have his defences up the way the rest of us will. And that was the riddle of his life — did Scientology ruin him, then make him vulnerable for the remainder of his life or was he an accident waiting to happen when Scientology came along? I have no good answer.

And I can’t resent him for bringing me into the cult. For me Scientology was an ugly excursion into a little corner of human nature. But that was far outweighed by the charm, generosity and energy I received from my dear cousin.

He made a lot of people happy.

— Ron Kasman

---

Want to help?

Please consider joining the Underground Bunker as a paid subscriber. Your $7 a month will go a long way to helping this news project stay independent, and you’ll get access to our special material for subscribers. Or, you can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal contribution to bunkerfund@tonyortega.org, an account administered by the Bunker’s attorney, Scott Pilutik. And by request, this is our Venmo link, and for Zelle, please use (tonyo94 AT gmail). E-mail tips to tonyo94@gmail.com.

---

Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:

Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain

Here’s the link to today’s post at tonyortega.org

And whatever you do, subscribe to this Substack so you get our breaking stories and daily features right to your email inbox every morning.

Paid subscribers get access to a special podcast series…

Group Therapy: Our round table of rowdy regulars on the week’s news