Before Gordon Gekko, the general public never heard of the The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. The movie Wall Street came out in ’87. I read the book in ’73 as part of my sales training. I was told about the book by an Sea Org member, who would become one of my mentors. When he was Scientology staff, he used to be a recruiter, the guy that would get people to commit to billion-year contracts.

When he wasn’t recruiting, he was a reg, the guy that sold Scientology services. He told me that The Art of War was standard reading material for members of the GO, which then was like the CIA of the Church. Now it’s almost cliché to hear someone in a film or TV quote The Art of War.  You’ve heard it in the Sopranos, Star Trek, 30 Something, Ghost Dog, Passenger 57, The Rock, Die Another Day and Gigli to mention a few, but it was course material for many Scientologists since the late 60’s.

My first job was innocent enough. It was selling hot pretzels off a cart. I would venture to guess that the pretzel carts that you see on the West Coast are here because of Scientologists. I might be wrong but I never saw a single cart out here before the Scientology company that I worked for had ‘em on the streets. I did well selling pretzels. I used to make eight cents a pretzel and on my best day I made $140.00. Everything I learned about sales I got from Scientologists. I learned deception and misdirection among other things.

That job led me to selling meat door to door and to my mentor, Larry W..  When I first worked with Larry we were selling neatly cut plastic wrapped steaks and porkchops in nice 10 # boxes. We’d accept food stamps and had a store right next door to a distribution center where the food stamps were issued on the 1st and the 15th. This was our base of operation when we weren’t hitting the streets going door to door. The store, if you could call it that, was just a big room with freezers.  My very first day working with Larry and the crew, he had me on the floor pitching and selling right beside him. We had a couple of designated “body routers” working too. Their job was to get the attention of people as they exited the food stamp distribution center and walk them into our store.  We were kept busy. 

After a few hours of non-stop hustling on my first day, this big-armed, red-faced woman walked into the place, yelling loud enough to drown out everyone.

“Larry!”

The store was absolutely packed, but it suddenly got real quiet. The whole room in unison turned in her direction.

“Those steaks you sold me last month all shrank!!”

You could feel the tension in the room and I wondered what kind of guys I’d gotten myself mixed up with and what kind of trouble this would bring. The box of Delmonico steaks I held and had been pushing to a group of potential buyers began to feel heavy. A ripple of sweat ran down the side of my face.  Then everybody looked at Larry and he let the silence have its effect for a beat or two.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, “the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him. If we do not wish to fight, all we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way.”

Larry fired back, “You dummy! I told you not to wash those steaks in hot water before you cooked them!” And he let that take it’s effect, then he started to laugh and the whole room laughed too and he said, “C’mere hon let me take care of you.”

And after maybe ten minutes he interrupted me in the middle of a sale to ask me if I could help the lady to her car, which I did, weighed down with enough boxes to feed an army.

Larry was damned good.

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