This is Cierra Westerman. She sent us this photo of herself with her then boyfriend, Dwayne Powell.
She first reached out to us last month saying that she wanted to come forward about the time she spent working for Powell and the Church of Scientology, spying on its former members.
Since then, she's been sending us photos and documents to prove she is who she says she is.
And then Dwayne Powell confirmed it for us.
In 2010, when Cierra was working full time to watch Mike Rinder and Christie Collbran for Scientology, she estimates that the operation in the Clearwater area alone used five rental homes, a dozen rental cars, and five full-time investigators at any one time. At the same time, similar operations were working in Colorado and Texas and Los Angeles.
The expense must have been incredible.
"You have no idea," Dwayne Powell says.
Cierra is from the Orlando area. In 2007 her father had a heart attack, and she was hoping to earn more money to help take care of him. So in January 2008 she entered a local trade school, City College of Casselberry, and its Private Investigation Services program.
Although they were both involved with other people at the time, before long they were dating. And then, by the early spring of 2008, they were presented with jobs by the City College faculty.
Records show that from 1998 to 2013, the Private Investigation Services department at City College (which moved from Casselberry to Altamonte Springs in 2010) was run by a licensed PI by the name of Michelle Morton. Cierra says that Morton was very close friends with another Florida private investigator named Terry Roffler, who was using the school as a recruiting ground for a huge amount of work he needed bodies for.
Morton and Roffler, Cierra says, used the college as a recruiting center for private investigation work for the Church of Scientology.
And in 2008, Scientology had a major need for security and intelligence work as it was overwhelmed with protests by the new Anonymous movement and its "Project Chanology." Growing out of a dispute over a Tom Cruise video the church had tried to censor from the Internet, Anonymous targeted Scientology with online attacks that then turned into real-life demonstrations beginning that February.
Cierra says that she and five other City College students were dispatched to Clearwater that April, recruited by Morton and Roffler. She and Dwayne Powell were among them, but as the only woman, she was chosen for a special assignment: infiltrate Anonymous.
When Anonymous held its pirate-themed "Sea Arrrrgh" rally in Clearwater in June 2008, Cierra was in the crowd, chanting along with the other protesters.
She says the footage she took that day was given to Terry Roffler, like everything she obtained in her work.
After several months gathering intel on Anons, Cierra then took most of 2009 off as she and Dwayne prepared for their first child, a son. She went back to the Orlando area, while Dwayne stayed in Clearwater, busy with the PI work for the church. They didn't see each other again until the middle of 2010, when their child was already six months old.
With a baby boy, Cierra now became an asset of another kind. She was assigned to move into a house across the street from outspoken former church members Mike Rinder and Christie Collbran, and to monitor who came to visit them.
"When someone came over, I'd take my son for a walk in his stroller, and then take photos of the cars and their license plates," she says.
Her young son was also involved in her other task: Getting Mike Rinder's trash.
"I'd take him to the small park and let him play until I saw the trash guys," she says. She paid trash workers to turn over bags from Rinder's house, as well as another church member, Haydn James.
She says they also did the mind-numbing work of trying to put back together shredded documents. "We worked on it for two months straight, trying to piece them together. We actually got a few clues out of it," she says.
For six months, she lived in the house and watched Rinder and recorded the license plates on visitors to his house. She was then replaced by another woman, Heather McAdoo, who was assigned to befriend Christie Collbran.
Christie recently published a lengthy account about that at Rinder's blog, and it's a fascinating look at what the operation was like from the perspective of the people who were targeted by it. Christie says Heather eventually expressed regret about taking part in the elaborate operation against her.
While Cierra was living at the house watching Mike and Christie, she says Powell was running a large operation that was centered out of a warehouse strategically placed so they could watch the man who at that time was Rinder's employer, an inventor named Robert Almblad.
At the Village Voice, we wrote extensively about Almblad, a former Scientology member who was trying to bring to market a machine that made sterile ice. Infections in hospitals are a huge problem, and traditional ice machines are filthy, so Almblad was working on something that potentially was a billion-dollar market.
In our two-part series about Almblad, he told us what it was like to try and sell his invention to large institutions while Scientology's operatives were constantly trying to sabotage him. At one point, they actually burst into a conference room in the middle of a meeting between Almblad and potential investors, claiming to be an investigative team reporting a story.
But Cierra tells us the warehouse was used for more than simply watching Almblad. It was where the Scientology spying operation had its control room while multiple operations were being run in the area.
"It was a room inside the warehouse, and it was small and cramped. It had two big screen TVs, a computer, and a phone that was for contacting Terry Roffler. The TVs were used for monitoring all the cameras watching the ex-members' houses," she says.
"And it was also for watching the cars that all had tracking devices, which was illegal in Florida," she says. But she claims that the operation had tracking devices on all of the cars of the ex-members they were watching.
Besides watching Mike Rinder's house, Cierra was also assigned the job of befriending an ex-church member who was a friend to Christie Collbran. Cierra spent several months getting involved in this woman's life, helping her with personal problems she had, and generally hoping to get information about what she was talking about with other exes.
"The reason they wanted me to get close to her was that she had a lot of paperwork on the church in her apartment," Cierra says. But despite her success gaining the woman's confidence, she never got access to that paperwork.
Because we have not been able to make contact with that ex-member who was targeted by Cierra, we're not going to name her at this time.
However, a person we are going to name is someone who was working with Cierra and Powell to spy on Tom DeVocht.
Cierra says she helped Val Graeve get around, but always had to stop far enough away so that Val could walk to DeVocht's apartment and not see that Cierra was driving her.
"How did she get involved? Dwayne met her, just like everybody else. He'd meet waitresses or women who worked at Walmart or at bars. And they'd end up doing as he asked," Cierra says.
In this case, Graeve's assignment had her working her way into the circle around Rinder and DeVocht until she was able to convince DeVocht to take her in.
Tom says that he was very careful at the time about not letting strangers into his life. Like Rinder, he knew he was under an aggressive form of surveillance. But he was hiring — he operated kiosks selling "Silly Bandz" at local malls — and Val was someone who another ex-member introduced him to.
DeVocht was living with a girlfriend at the time in a large Palm Harbor apartment, and when Val asked if she could rent one of the rooms, DeVocht said yes.
"About three to four weeks into it, I wondered if she was a plant," he says. "For one, she had the oddest schedule. And she supposedly had no money, but all of a sudden she bought a new Mercedes. My girlfriend and I couldn't understand it, and where was she coming up with all of the money for the pot? And she had beautiful purses and jewelry.
Rinder tells us he isn't surprised to hear that Val was working for Powell. "I told Tom and Robert [Almblad] she was a spy," he says.
We called Val's Tampa business and left a message, we also sent her a detailed email about why we were trying to reach her. She hasn't responded.
Naturally, we are reminded of the time, in the summer of 1973, when the church got a spy into the apartment of Paulette Cooper. The author of the scathing 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology, Paulette had been framed by the church in an elaborate scheme in late 1972, and by May 1973 she had been indicted and was facing 15 years in federal prison for something she didn't do. She was distraught and sick, and at that low moment she took in a boarder to help her pay the rent. He said his name was Jerry Levin, and from May to September he lived with her in her East 40th Street apartment in Manhattan, helping to take care of her dog and doing other things she was finding difficult to do for herself. Only years later did she learn that he was a Scientology operative who was sending back daily reports to the church. To Scientology, he was known as "Don Alverzo," but his real name turned out to be Jeff Marino, and he lives in Long Island today. He claimed not to be Don Alverzo when we called him when we were researching our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.
Scientology has used the excuse that it was a "rogue outfit," the Guardian's Office, that ran operations on Paulette Cooper in the 1970s, and that it doesn't do that kind of thing today.
But Cierra Westerman has now come forward to say that the church was doing the exact same thing in 2010-2011, getting a Scientology operative into the apartment of a church "enemy" in order to spy on him.
By late 2011, Cierra tells us, she'd soured on her work for the church.
She stopped working for Powell and tried to make it on her own. "I was cleaning houses. I tried to go back to school, but it was hard." In 2012, she spent some time with Dwayne in Virginia, but otherwise she rarely saw him. He was usually on assignment for the church.
Despite running Scientology operations from Wisconsin to Miami, after his arrest Dwayne Powell retreated to Tennessee, where he owns and runs a roadside restaurant just over the Alabama state line. We called him there and told him we were speaking to Cierra.
In 2014, Cierra moved to Tennessee to be near Dwayne and so her son could see him. They then had another son who was born in 2016. But Cierra and Dwayne are separated today.
Dwayne was reluctant to talk when we called him, but he did say that he regretted getting involved with Scientology.
"I wish I'd never been affiliated with them. I took the job as a favor to Terry Roffler," he says.
Today, Cierra is raising her two sons on her own in Tennessee, and she has recently gone back to school, where she says she plans to study journalism. She tells us that part of her inspiration is this website, which she has been reading since finding our 2015 stories about Dwayne's arrest in Wisconsin.
"My degree in private investigations actually comes in very handy for journalism. I'm very excited to start back at school," she says.
And we're very happy that she decided to drop us a line.
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