The Scientologists have claimed in court documents that one man involved in the scheme was Ala Fadili Al Tamimi, a native of the United Arab Emirates, who blazed an unparalleled trail of fraud across Massachusetts before jumping bail, according to charges still pending against him. Scientologists say that they gave him $25,000 for writing an affidavit -- a move which is technically legal, if risky -- in which he claimed he had helped mastermind the bogus check scheme along with Flynn. When the Boston Globe, in July 1984, wrote about those allegations, Larry Reservitz got a laugh at the Scientologists’ pursuit of Flynn, who, Reservitz said, had nothing to do with the check. Michael Flynn didn’t laugh. He sued the Globe for libel, a case that is still pending.
(A federal grand jury, however, does not doubt that Tamimi had some involvement with the bogus Hubbard check. Indeed, court records in Germany, where he is being held, indicate that Tamimi was secretly indicted in Boston last November for attempting, along with his brother, to pass two bogus checks at the Madison Avenue Middle East Bank between April and June of 1982. The indictment remains sealed, apparently pending Tamimi’s extradition to this country on old fraud charges unrelated to this case. Tamimi recently was extradited from a prison in Italy to a prison in Germany, as he makes the rounds of atonement for a career of fraud.)
The latest chapter in the bogus-check case was made public last week: reputed organized-crime figure George T. Kattar, 67, of Methuen, and defrocked lawyer Harvey Brower, 49, of Swampscott, were indicted last week on fraud and extortion charges. The grand jury claims that Brower and Kattar offered to provide information to Scientologists about the bogus Hubbard check for $100,000. Brower and Kattar allegedly bilked the Scientologists out of an initial down payment of $33,333, using “threatened force, violence and fear.” The indictment says Brower and Kattar gave Scientologists inaccurate information about the check, but the indictment doesn’t detail the nature of that information.
Scientologists say that they were threatened in their dealings with Kattar and Brower. And Earle C. Cooley, a lawyer for the Scientologists, says that they were bilked in that they did not receive the documentation and witnesses they had been promised. But Cooley says he remains unconvinced that the information Scientologists did receive -- which implicated Flynn -- was inaccurate. “The church is satisfied that there is a complex breadth of obstruction and conspiracy involved in this entire affair,” says Boston lawyer Harry L. Manion III, who, along with Cooley, represents the church. “This indictment represents the outer skin if a very strong-smelling onion. The church will continue to peel the onion until its core is fully exposed.”
The Scientologists have become increasingly bitter over what they perceive as the federal government’s failure to aggressively investigate the bogus Hubbard check and the Kattar-Brower matter. They have taken out advertisements in newspapers offering a $75,000 reward for information about “complicity and/or obstruction of justice” by four federal prosecutors, three FBI agents, and two private lawyers. The indictment against Kattar and Brower was brought in part because a Scientologist, Geoffrey Shervell, secretly tape-recorded – at the behest of the FBI – his negotiations for their information, according to those familiar with the case. But part of the government’s case will be to prove that the information that Brower and Kattar allegedly supplied was phony. And given that Larry Reservitz claims, on tapes he made for the government, that he was involved in the check scheme, it seems likely he will take the witness stand for the prosecution to repeat that assertion, thereby undermining any contention Kattar and Brower might make that Flynn did indeed mastermind the Hubbard check.
