"Morpheus" & "compound complex", I was just reading your comments about Dan Sydlik. I worked with one of his contemporaries from his time in the Writing Department and this senior writer spilled the beans on the reasons for his being "shafted" and it was not related to the apostasy shuffling of Dunlap & Franz's time. Sydlik was a lazy writer and he was caught plagiarizing articles from periodicals. He had been warned before but evidently ignored it. Then later there happened one glaring incidence of plagiarism wherein he pretty much rewrote an article from Reader's Digest and it was to obvious to overlook. So, he was "shafted" and never allowed back in the Writing Department, he was later sent to "Personnel".
I also used to work around and with Ciro Aulicino during my years at Bethel 1995-2006, and last I heard, as of 2015, he was still working in the Writing Department (though he has not actually done any writing for decades, he's a research assistant). From what I heard he was "shafted" more than once, and deservedly so. He is a very eccentric personality and his mouth gets him into trouble. A group of us young guys would travel with him in the late 90s on his local Bethel speaking assignments. It was always a production. A few of us would travel with him to a congregation and enjoy hospitality afterwards. Ciro would liven the stage with one one of his famous talks/performances (at that time usually, "You Will Be With Me In Paradise"). It was entertaining. I found him hilarious (laughed mostly at him, but also with him). He did not realize I was the one who got him into trouble later in 2001. It was after September 11, 2001, and he had a speaking assignment in North Carolina in a large auditorium and he made some unsubstantiated claims about the king of the north & south finding new fulfillment, and that 9/11 was ushering us into the great tribulation at that very moment. He represented himself as a senior Bethel family member working in the Writing Department representing Bethel (though by that time he had not been a writer for some time and worked mostly as a researcher for writers). This sent many of the friends into a frenzy in that area. One of the attendees was a friend of mine, a local elder who had come into Bethel not long after me. He called me that night after the talk, thinking this Ciro was apostatizing. I asked him to send me his recording of the talk and in a few days I gave it to David Mercante (a Bethel heavy I knew would be able to investigate it). I listened to it too and indeed Ciro had in my opinion overstepped. Within a week Ciro was again subsequently removed from the Bethel speakers list (these were Bethelites who were approved for outgoing speaking assignments as representatives of Bethel), David confided he'd been removed at least a few times before because of his talks & behavior. I am not sure why he was tolerated so much, but from what I saw working with older Bethelites, learning their history, and even witnessing their conduct, many transgressions were overlooked. It was all kept in the "family".
As a side note, as far as I know Ciro never got into trouble for representing the society in NGO paperwork, when Watchtower was an NGO affiliated with the UN department of Public Information, DPI. As a researcher he traveled there on Wednesday afternoons gathering information for writers. For awhile, in the late 90s, I actually worked with Ciro, helping him do his filing work Wednesday mornings and everyone knew where he was going on Wednesday afternoons.
There is much to be said but so little time to say it. Cheers!
