Word: freemen
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...land. All of it once belonged to Ralph Clark and his brother Emmett, busted wheat farmers turned fringe ideologues. Visitors say that these days Ralph Clark sometimes wears a lawman's five-pointed star, to signify that he's the law. For him and the 10 or so other Freemen holed up inside, some of them for more than a year, the compound is sovereign territory, with its own courts, laws and officials. It's also their light armory, ministry of information, and--the most important thing--national bank...
Over the past year, the self-styled Freemen churned out more than $1.8 million in phony money orders and other financial instruments, according to federal indictments. They used those to defraud banks, credit-card companies and mail-order businesses. A favorite tactic was to use liens filed against the property of government officials and others, then issue worthless money orders or checks using that property as collateral. Some unwary businesses, car dealerships, even the irs, have accepted them. Meanwhile, the Freemen have allegedly harassed local officials and brazenly taught weekend seminars in fraud and larceny to hundreds...
With the arrest last week of two of the group's leaders and an escalating fbi presence around the Clark farm, Justus Township is no longer merely the headquarters for the Freemen's crooked amalgam of extremism and thievery. It's also the first major testing ground for federal law enforcement in the nervous aftermath of two disasters--the deadly shootout with white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the Branch Davidian inferno near Waco, Texas, in which more than 75 people were killed. In its handling of such standoffs, the Justice Department is at pains...
...irony is that for months local officials have been begging for the cavalry to arrive. The Freemen have spent much of the past year in a campaign of intimidation, confident they could outgun local law enforcement, which in those parts means Sheriff Charles Phipps and his deputy. Since April 1, 1994, when the Clarks first retreated to their farms, later to be joined by fugitives from other areas, the Freemen have posted $1 million bounties on the heads of Phipps, county attorney Nick Murnion and local bankers, threatened to kidnap and hang local judges, and put phony liens...
Since the freemen aren't wanted on firearm charges, the ATF is conspicuously absent. Those agents who actually fired the guns and made the worst of the decisions at Ruby Ridge and Waco aren't there to force violence with their rash actions...