Neighbors Await Freedom From ‘Freemen’

Dean Rogge heard the rumble of engines in the dead hours before dawn, coming down the dirt road that runs through the Montana prairies. Then he saw the headlights.

Two of Montana’s most-wanted fugitives were on the move: “Freemen” LeRoy Schweitzer and Rodney Skurdal--holed up for more than a year in the Bull Mountains near Roundup, Mont.--were heading for the ranch of fellow fugitive Ralph Clark. They were accompanied by armed guards from the Militia of Montana.

Garfield County Sheriff Charles Phipps knew about it. So did the Musselshell County sheriff and the county prosecutor, who’d been trying to arrest and convict the pair for nearly two years.

As the convoy motored up the back roads outside of Jordan, 20 rifles of the Militia of Montana stood between the fugitives and the law. But in Garfield County, with one sheriff and two deputies, that was enough.

“I just thought it was kind of unbelievable for this community to be having such a thing as an armed convoy come in here,” said Rogge, who watched the seven-vehicle motorcade pass by from his ranch house.

The Standoff Begins

This week, the FBI and more than 100 federal and local agents set up camp near the ranch. They lured Schweitzer and fellow freeman Daniel Petersen Jr. out on a ruse, arresting them on fraud charges and charges of threatening the life of a judge. Skurdal and about a dozen others remain on Clark’s 760-acre ranch in a standoff that by Friday had spanned five days.

In Jordan--a town of 550 residents and a blinking traffic light, located 30 miles down the road--concern is growing that the FBI’s fear of turning the standoff into another incident like those at Waco, Texas, or Ruby Ridge, Idaho, is going to let Skurdal and company off the hook once again.

“You wonder if the very foundation of our law hasn’t crumbled already,” said rancher Joe Murnion, who lives a few miles from the Clark ranch. “Nobody wants to add ‘Justus Township’ to Waco and Ruby Ridge. But it isn’t going to do ‘em [law enforcement] any good to go pussyfooting around. Most of the people here would like ‘em to just go ahead and take ‘em out.”

The people of Jordan kept trying to tell the world that something was wrong.

Schweitzer and Skurdal had set up a common-law government, dubbed Justus Township. They were issuing fake driver’s licenses and license plates, filing $100-million-plus liens against neighboring properties and officials, challenging ranch foreclosures and writing bogus checks and money orders that defrauded banks, credit card companies and mail-order houses out of at least $1.8 million.

Now, they were holding weekend training seminars. For $100, anybody could come in and learn how to draft the phony money orders on a computer and challenge any framework of law outside the Constitution. They had a hangman’s noose at the front of the classroom to show what you did to government officials who challenged the new citizens’ law.

“It got to the point where you’d go up to QDs Restaurant, and there’d be cars in the parking lot from Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa--you name it. They were up here, and all of them were going out to Clark’s place,” one resident said.

The courthouse was flooded with freemen legal filings. Two weeks ago, court clerk Connie Nielsen got a $500-million judgment from them that they ordered her to sign. “I, Connie Nielsen, do suffer from a great lack of brain cells caused by my continuous seduction as a prostitute for the purported [Garfield] county attorney Nick Murnion and his Masonic brotherhood, the Montana State Bar Assn.,” the document said. She tossed the document in a drawer.

A Bit of Advice

Neighbors around the Clark ranch who had their cattle grazing on leased state and federal lands got legal notices that the lands now belonged to the freemen--and if they trespassed on them, they would be “punished.”

Rancher K.L. Bliss got a visit not long ago from Kenny South, Clark’s son-in-law. “He was just passing along advice that Ralph was upset, and they would retaliate against me for buying” Clark’s foreclosed property, Bliss recounted. “Sure, I was worried. Any time you’ve got 15 armed men living out there who are mad at you--and you’re an hour away from the nearest law enforcement, if they even answer the phone--sure, you’re worried.”

Tired of waiting for the FBI to move in, several ranchers and townspeople started circulating a petition to close the road out to the ranch and cut off the phone. They made plans to form a posse if that didn’t work.

“This community has put up with them for three long years, and it’s been steadily growing worse to see this stream of people coming and going and learning to do the same thing in their own communities,” said Cecil Weeding, a rancher and former state legislator. “People were getting tired of being threatened every day and wondering when we’re going to be another Oklahoma City--and who knew what was coming up and down that road?”

So the virtual invasion of FBI, IRS and state patrol agents this week--camped out at the Garfield County fairgrounds and running shifting roadblocks out to the ranch--was the first hope that somebody was going to do something. Now, Jordan residents want to know, exactly what are they going to do?

“They keep talking about peaceful negotiations, but I don’t think they’re going to go. They’re going to stand right there unless somebody goes and takes them out, and they’ve had a long, good time to get ready,” Joe Murnion said. “You’d think none of this would be worth dying over, but you don’t know. People have died over less.”

*

Nobody ever figured Clark was the kind of guy to head a passionate band of resisters out on the range. Not that he didn’t want to do something. He always had plans. He wanted to expand the ranch, run more cattle, build a game farm out there.

He went to the supply company that county appraiser Jack Shawver used to run, handed over his $35,000 federal farm loan and bought two truckloads of steel bars and other equipment for the game farm. But it never got off the ground.

“Ralph was always a guy with big ideas and other people’s money,” one of his cousins recalled.

Clark was keeping afloat with loans from the federal Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA, and the Farmers Credit Administration. He took out a $31,500 mortgage on the ranch in 1972, and then followed it up with a $233,570 loan six years later. By 1981, he had borrowed $1.1 million more on the ranch. Joe Murnion said that FmHA “kept throwing good money after bad” in an effort to keep Clark solvent, eventually sinking $1.8 million into the ranch.

But the Farm Credit Bank of Spokane, Wash., foreclosed, ordering the ranch sold at a sheriff’s auction on April 14, 1994. It didn’t have to come to that, neighbors said. A single one of Clark’s federal farm subsidy checks would have paid the $33,557 overdue mortgage payment. But Clark, they said, was never one to pay the bank. He’d get the checks and go out and buy a new tractor or pickup truck.

By this time, Clark had linked up with co-freemen defendant William Stanton. He too fell into financial trouble--and trouble with the government.

Anti-Government Talk

Clark and Stanton, along with Stanton’s son Ebert, started talking about how the government didn’t have the authority to just take their ranches. They asserted that the government had moved far from its roots in the Constitution and Magna Carta. Research taught them how they could set up common-law courts to give citizens a fair trial before their land got taken away.

Clark’s Justus (created from “Just Us”) Township issued a document responding to the impending ranch foreclosure. He said the bank never loaned him any money at all, “for reason the Congress of the U.S. has declared a total national and international bankruptcy on the 5th day of June, 1933, the Coinage Act of 1965 and Public Law 90-269 of 1968.”

He ended his response with a quote from the Bible, James 5:12: “But before all, my brethren, do not swear, neither by the heavens, nor by the Earth, nor any other kind of oath: but let your yes be yes, and your no, no; so that you may not fall under a sentence.”

Nick Murnion eventually got a court order prohibiting the clerk from accepting frivolous legal filings. The response was another filing, declaring a $1-million bounty on the county attorney’s head, as well as on the head of the judge and the sheriff.

The town collectively shook its head, wondering why Clark wouldn’t just pay the bills.

“Everybody up here has faced the same situation,” said Shawver, the appraiser, “where the stock market was down and wheat is down. But they tightened the belt and made the payment. These guys are just wheelers and dealers. And then they come around and say the FmHA isn’t legal. Well, it was legal enough when it gave them the money.

“The sad part of it,” Shawver said, “is they were all capable. Like Ralph. He was a very good sheep shearer. But he didn’t have enough ambition to go out and make that living. He’d borrow money to pay taxes, and then go out and buy a pickup truck. But don’t let anybody tell you it was some political thing. It was never a political thing. Ralph just couldn’t pay his bills.”

While Clark and Stanton staved off the law in Jordan, Schweitzer and Skurdal were holed up outside Roundup. Schweitzer--a pilot who had owned a crop-dusting service in Colfax, Wash.--got into a beef with the IRS over a $700 tax bill back in 1977 and hooked up with others who were grumbling about the government.

The Billings Gazette interviewed a former friend, who told about the day a state inspector showed up and complained that Schweitzer’s employees might be endangered by a grinding machine that didn’t have an electrical ground. Schweitzer fired his only employee on the spot. “Now, there are no employees who work here. So see how your regulation protected the man,” Schweitzer reportedly told the inspector.

Facing criminal prosecution on state charges of allegedly threatening local officials, Schweitzer hid out at Skurdal’s ranch. Federal authorities allege that the two of them perfected a scheme to print up bogus money orders and send them around the country.

Incredibly, it worked.

Money Made Easily

Companies such as L.L. Bean, credit card firms and even the state of Minnesota accepted the realistic-looking money orders and shipped out merchandise.

Often, according to the federal indictments, the money orders would be sent in as overpayments, and companies would issue large refunds in real cash. Authorities estimate the freemen issued up to $30 million in bogus checks, up to $1.8 million of which apparently were honored.

After Schweitzer, Skurdal and several other freemen moved to Clark’s place at Jordan, they held seminars on how to set up common-law courts and issue bogus checks. Up to 800 visitors have paid $100 a piece.

“We are the new Federal Reserve,” Schweitzer declared at one recent seminar, recorded on videotape. “We’re the new kid on the block. We are competing with the Federal Reserve, and we have every authority to do it, and they didn’t like the competition. They had a monopoly for many, many years.”

Virgil Hellyer, the local convenience-store owner who attended a recent seminar, said spectators sat in a classroom located in a mobile home, along with a roomful of computers and fax machines. In addition to the hangman’s noose, there were two crossed spears and a shield on the wall.

Hellyer said the leaders talked about the superiority of the white race, and how women were subservient to men. “They talked about how women were here for us to use. That they shouldn’t be able to vote. That a white male was the supreme being,” Hellyer recalled.

The white supremacy aspect has been troubling for Montana human rights activists. They say the freemen follow the principles of Christian Identity, which holds that Jews and people of color descended as inferior stock from the biblical figure Cain.

Jerry Walters, the Lutheran pastor in Roundup, said that he once got a letter from Skurdal welcoming him to town. “What I need to know before I attend the church, being that I was brought up as Lutheran and baptized as such, is what you will be teaching as to our race [Israel] with that of others,” Skurdal wrote. “I have not attended any churches for the past 15 years, due to the fact that the past pastors have told us the ‘Jews’ are God’s chosen people, contrary to the teachings of My Lord and King, JESUS . . . and that as written by the Honorable Dr. Martin Luther, who understood the hatred the Jews had toward us, Israel.”

Walters visited Skurdal in prison, when he and several other freemen were briefly arrested last year after showing up at the local sheriff’s station with the head of the Militia of Montana, carrying several guns in their car. The concealed weapons charges later were dropped.

“In my conversations with them, clearly the church is part of the conspiracy,” Walters said in an interview. “That we talk about peace and grace, love, these kinds of things. That is taken as a way to appease the white race, or make them apathetic, and rather the call should be a call to war.”

Freemen supporters outside the Clark ranch say it’s come down to a government that no longer represents its people. They say Clark, Schweitzer, Skurdal and the rest are being punished because they found out about it.

“Basically, all they’re talking about is real law, common law, people’s law. They stand on sovereignty and the 10th Amendment. To put it in a small tense, basically what we’ve got is a republic on a collision course with democracy,” freeman Lyle Chamberlain said in an interview.

He said he has been fielding dozens of phone calls from supporters around the nation prepared to come to Montana to stand in support of the freemen. “I’ve had a lot of calls, and I say all you can do is come on up and bear witness to what happens.”

On Friday, the FBI searched and briefly detained two men in a pickup truck with Oregon plates who were carrying an assortment of guns through downtown Jordan.

“We’re going to go in [to the ranch] tomorrow,” one of the men, Todd Silvera, told reporters. “We’re taking them [the weapons] 180 miles outta here. We’ve got some friends down there.”

The freemen, Chamberlain said, have offered to send a representative to negotiate with the holdouts at the Clark ranch. They have offered to escort them out to Oklahoma, where they feel the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will guarantee them a fairer trial. But so far, he said, the FBI has not taken them up on their offer. Now, he believes, the FBI is monitoring all of their activities, even their phone calls.

“Have you ever heard of a harp, basically a high-frequency radio wave?” Chamberlain inquired. “It changes your emotions immediately. I was talking to an individual on the phone line, and it didn’t just happen to me, it happened to him.

“It was kind of a long, crackling tone. What it done, it repeated the last two sentences back to us, and then it hits you right in the brain. It knocked me right over. You know, they experimented with this thing over there in Desert Storm. That’s how they got those Iraqis to throw their guns down and start running around in circles.”

*

Jordan figures that however this standoff ends, the town will never get over it. Not when half the town has relatives out on the ranch.

The local agricultural services secretary is Clark’s cousin. The waitress at the cafe has relatives out there, so do most of the ranchers on the road outside the compound. The sheriff is related to one of the guys who’s buying some of Clark’s foreclosed land. The barber’s daughter used to be married to Clark’s nephew. (The nephew wrote out a phony $180,000 check for the divorce settlement.)

Nor have Clark’s own relations been immune. Neighbors said that Dean Clark, another nephew, found financing to redeem part of the foundering ranch and was going to move back into the house he’d been born in. He planted wheat, combined it, and when he came back to pick it up, Clark wouldn’t let him have it. He had to rent pasture land for his cattle when Clark threw him off.

“They told him they’d kill him if he came back,” one neighbor said.

Other Entanglements

The entanglements go on. Hellyer’s wife, Carol, is the sister of Agnes Stanton, William Stanton’s wife and one of those named in the indictment. Carol Hellyer works as a dispatcher at the sheriff’s department. The freemen have accused her of telling law enforcement about them. Then, when the police heard Ebert Stanton was leaving the ranch and went out to get him, and missed him, the police figured it was because Hellyer’s wife warned him they were coming.

She hasn’t spoken to her sister since December. “It’s been tough on her. She used to have brown hair, and now it’s almost white,” Hellyer said.

Another woman who’s grown up in Jordan and has relatives out at the ranch says she has no blood sympathies. She just wants to know why she has to pay her bills and they don’t.

“The rest of us have to pay taxes, why shouldn’t they?” she demanded. “At this point, I wouldn’t care if they went in there and shot every one of them. It’s just gotten to that point. What the hell are they waiting for?”

Joe Murnion says the FBI is mistaken if it thinks it can out-wait the freemen. They have generators, large food and ammunition stocks, and the will to wait out the alternative of a long sentence in federal prison.

“Everybody has criticized [federal officials] for their heavy-handed approach. But you tell me, what’s the FBI for if it’s not to enforce the law?” Murnion asked. “So now they’re not going to do anything, is that right? If this thing goes on for 60 days, I’m going to be madder than I was before.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where They Are, What They Want

* The Charges: Authorities say the anti-government militants issued millions of dollars in worthless money orders and checks in attempts to buy guns and pay taxes.

* The Freemen: They deny the legitimacy of government and say they have their own laws and courts.