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nessie:So this is four hours later, you're downtown, you're handcuffed to a chair, and you haven't been charged?
squatter: No charges, no warrants, no nothing.
nessie: Did they take everybody downtown?
squatter: Everybody that was at the house or came to the house.
nessie: They still had the house, while you're downtown?
squatter: They're still going through the house, and answering the phone. A lot of people called up and the guy'd say, "Hello," and they'd say, "Is this Seeds?" and he'd go, "Yeah, uh, uh, what do you have to tell me?" or something like that, and they'd go, "Who the fuck are you?" I doubt if they talked to more than two or three people, even though they had the house for more than 16 hours. They kept the house. They searched it, searched it, searched it. They never searched the back house. It had a separate address, so I guess they thought somebody else lived there.
nessie: How do you know they didn't search through the back house?
squatter: Well, there was no ... The front house they tossed! The back house was exactly the same, even the dust. You know, there wasn't footprints in it or anything.
nessie: It's an in-law cottage you're talking about.
squatter: That had had a fire and was gutted and just had a roof on it. You remember.
nessie: Yeah, it was under construction.
squatter: Yeah. And if that's where, if you were trying to make a bomb, that's where all the tools were, all the nails were, all the everything. That's where you'd look.
nessie: And they never looked there?
squatter: Never. Never went through the doorway. A real bozo move. (long pause) Where was I?Stephanie: Handcuffed to the chair.
squatter: Oh yeah, I was handcuffed to the chair. They leave. A couple minutes later, I decide, OK, I'm gonna break the chair. So I slam the chair maybe twice against the wall. It's a kinda aluminum-legged chair. It doesn't break, but this guy pops in, "What are you doing, yadda da yadda da." I say, "Hey, I want out. Or I want a charge. One or the other, I'm gonna get it in the next couple minutes, or I'm breaking this chair." "Hang on a couple of minutes, I'll talk to Lieutenant So-and-So, yadda, yadda." He closes the door. I decide I'm not waiting for that guy. It's just another cop ploy. So I pick up the chair. I'm just about to slam it against the wall when the door opens again and now it looks like I'm gonna assault the guy with the chair. I'm like, fuck, I don't wanna assault a cop with a chair, I'll get the shit kicked outa me. I get the chair under my butt. He says, "We're gonna cut you all loose. We're gonna get you all together." He takes the handcuffs off. By now it's, I don't know what time it is. It turns out it's 5:00 – 5:30, 6-ish. Prime news hour. Live shit. So they collect us up in a room. They ask us if we want to make a statement.
nessie: How many people?
squatter: Me, Sarah, E. J., Alex, Guin, and Michael, I think, seven. Oh Heidi! And Heather! Eight. A bunch of us. Seven, eight, ten. That's what it is. They pull us all together; they ask us if we want to make a statement. We say, "No." Do we know what's going on? No. They tell us Judi and Darryl have been blown up in a car bomb. We're like ca-rocked. How are they? Well, they're in the hospital. That's all they'll tell us. They give us their card. They ask us to make a statement again. Hey sit on it and rotate, motherfucker. And so, they say, OK. They open the door. We take like three steps and they push us out and we are locked out into the lobby of the Oakland Police station and we are hit with reporters, people, the whole intensity. All I remember was this reporter coming up to me standing in my face, and the thing going, and, "Do you have anything to say? Yadda dada da" And I say, "The police are behind this." Our whole statement was, "The police had something to do with this." We figured it was innocuous, and true, y'know. So we go out. Somebody meets us, tells us a little about what's going on and we decide, lets get out of this madhouse, lets go to our house. We go to our house. The street is blocked off. The cops won't let us in. Nobody's there we know, except us.
nessie: The cops are still there?
squatter: Yep. They still have our house. They're still going through the house.Stephanie: Had you mentioned that way back when you got picked up some of the people at Seeds had noticed that I was there. The media was there.
squatter: Yeah, way back, way back.
nessie: You'll get you're turn, don't worry about that!Stephanie: I just (unintelligible) at that time.
squatter: We got you at both houses, your story, pretty much. Um, so then we get back to the house. (unintelligible) has given us a ride, and come with another car. We go to our old house. The cops have moved in. They have control of it. At that time I decide I'm going to her house. She was in north Oakland at the time in her own place.
nessie: That place on 59thSt.?
squatter: No.Stephanie: 45th. Down the street from Oakland Tech.
squatter: Whatever. So I head over to her house, and she comes with the car and tells me a little about what's been going on and we're going to our house to meet David and the attorney.We get there. Our house is not our house. The attorney can't make it be our house. They still don't have a warrant.
nessie: OK, in the house you have two computers ...
squatter: One computer, an IBM.
nessie: And a 10,000-name card file of people that donate ...
squatter: People that we have been in contact with through various actions. Some give money. Most don't. The vast majority don't.
nessie: OK, so it's like you keep a mailing list?
squatter: Right.
nessie:So they got the mailing list. And they were in the house for at least five or six hours with that?
squatter: Twelve-plus.
nessie: When did you get the house back?
squatter: OK, so they won't give us the house back so we decide we can't stay here, let's go some place. Lisa says she and her fiancee have a house and we say OK, we'll all go over there for the night. Meanwhile Guin decides he's going to stay until they release the house. They say, at some time around midnight, they say, "No problem, guy. You can leave. We're gonna home. It's our responsibility, in the morning, when you come back, we'll return it to you." Of course, in the middle of the night, at some point they leave and leave the house wide open to the neighborhood. And they disappear. So when we come at 6 a.m. ...
nessie: They left the door open?
squatter: Wide. Nothing was locked.
nessie: But nobody stole the computer?
squatter: I don't think nobody dared to go near that house.
nessie: Well if you was that crack dealer across the street, would you go in the house the FBI had just been in for twelve hours?
squatter: For sixteen. No I would not. And neither did anybody else. So we got our house back – trashed – the next morning And we were pretty freaked out. We let the media come through the house before we cleaned it up or touched it really. They came through and said, "God! They trashed your house!" They took pictures of the house being trashed. We started a media campaign, everyday, of looking for errors and ways to fuck 'em around. And at the same time we said, "The action goes on! No matter what! This is not gonna stop us from organizing! We are not gonna lose our focus, because that's what they want." We did the action. We never looked back till it was over.
nessie: OK, so, you took off for Redwood Summer, you camped in the woods. They shot at you. Tell about that.
squatter: We had a little fax newspaper. There was offices all up and down the west coast, well, in northern California. We tied it together through a communications network, and they faxed in what ever happened. At that place, that day. So then a guy compiled them and sent them back so it was essentially a fax newspaper. It reported all incidences of violence.
nessie: Whose offices? Seeds offices, Earth First's offices, and who else?
squatter: IWW. Those were the main ones. We set up an office just outside of Garberville, an office in an abandoned greenhouse nursery type place.We had another one up in Arcata. We had one in Laytonville. We had one out at Alder Point. We had EarthFirst! in the city. And us over in Berkeley. And we compiled information on actual incidents of violence, of attacks and stuff, and there were lots of 'em. It was amazing. We collected all them and saved them and gave them to Bill Simpich. We gave them to him. There were so many to substantiate the case that there was open violence against us and the police didn't do shit about it. There were shots over camp. There was this botch in the very beginning. We counted on some locals to find us a site. It's a mistake to count on people who haven't done this kind of thing to do it, because they just don't have the experience and don't understand what's needed. They picked out a little tiny plot of land under a very wide, huge pull-off of 101, directly below it. It was at least 45 degrees straight up. Maybe even steeper. We pull in, and these logger types come out with ... as it turns out ... my eyes aren't so great, and they were far up the hill and they have what turns out to be a video camera on a shoulder aimed at us, but I think it's a rifle. The reporter from the Village Voice and the reporter from I think it was the Bay Guardian or, no it was the San Jose Mercury, they all think he's got a gun too. They're all hiding underneath the kitchen trailer. This guy's aiming what we think is a rifle at us, and the police come. The land turns out to be not cool, it's privately owned. There's a big scene, and they go up and investigate and it turns out we're lucky, man, 'cause we went up to confront the logger guys with the camera, we sent two people up the hill and just at the same time as we arrived at the top of the hill, what's her name, uh, uh, Lori, pulls up in a car and gets out to eat sandwiches and they think that we've got great radio communication and we're really together and what it really is is blind luck. So they "realize" that, hey man, these people have good security, which is a joke, but they don't know. We're there with three Seeds people and one or two volunteer people trying to set up a camp that we know is a dead duck. So the police finally come and we get maps from the county and sure enough, we're on private land. So we're booted. We go over to this supporter's house in Laytonville, and we stay there while we hunt up a new site, which eventually becomes the Honeydew Camp. The first day we set it up these logger types go by with four or five guys and snatch the banner flag from out in front of the camp that's by the road and yell some shit and then that night begins the first of many nights of people shooting towards or over the camp.
nessie: That went on all summer?
squatter: On and off.
nessie: Did anybody actually get shot?
squatter: Nobody in the camps ever got shot. Only one time do I believe that people really made a real attempt to actually shoot somebody, and they were probably blasted drunk and missed anyway. Close though. It was at this fucked camp that the fucking Feds pushed us into because our people there didn't have the guts to say, "Call the National Guard. We'd love some national media." They pushed us out of this legal camping zone and into this other place where they bent the rules so we could camp there long-term, but it was in a bowl, a canyon all the way around it. It was a snipers heaven. We got sniped there, pretty good. And this drunk came in with a knife and he tried to rape this young woman there and we had to, like, accost him and then the police and had to cart that guy away. It was just a bad location. And you know, there were so many informants, at times they were tripping over each other. There were ones that you could just pick out. "Yeah, that guy!" They'd have this funny story about how, "I just got out of prison, blah, blah, blah." Yeah, right. Cops. Or at least, working for the cops. That kind of stuff happened all summer long. People were beaten. Like this one guy went into this ... he was kind of dumb ... he went into a logger bar to drink and they took him out to a clear cut and stripped him and chained him to a stump and beat him half to death.
nessie: That was locals, right? That wasn't ...
squatter: That was loggers.
nessie: But other locals are people like Judi Bari.
squatter: Right.
nessie: The community's split up there.
squatter: Yeah, the community's split. In some towns it's fifty-fifty. In other towns, it's not so good. Like you go through company towns, and like there's one or two voices in the wilderness. But you go to Garberville and it's the majority are against the logging. It just depends on what town. Arcata's probably fifty-fifty. It's real close in Arcata. Those are like the cool centers are like Arcata and Garberville. And Laytonville. which is maybe seventy-thirty, their favor. But these are the centers of our strength, where we have maybe thirty percent on our side. Those are not good odds.
nessie: Right.
squatter: There's only one town where we're the majority, Garberville.
nessie: OK, so lets back up a little. Seeds goes out to Nevada.
squatter: Yep!
nessie: OK, say something about your relationship with Wackenhut, because it might be a factor because of the way that Wackenhut and the FBI overlap and your lives and the FBI seem to be overlapping here.
squatter: Well, we go out to the Nevada Test Site, twice a year, and uh, we basically show the world that Wackenhuts are bozos as security, and they can't guard a nuclear butthole in the ground, y'know, surrounded by ... it's larger than the state of Rhode Island ... nothingness ... you know ... mountains and dry and hot and we still always dance on ground zero. We keep makin' 'em look bad and they're pissed about it.
nessie: How long has this been going on?
squatter: Well, I personally started messing with them in 1986. We were amateurs then. In 1988, we came back with the goal of messing with 'em. In 1989 we pushed their buttons. We actively pissed them off, a psychological campaign of showing them what bozos they are. We landed a crippled woman on crutches way deep into the site where crippled people that can't walk shouldn't get. And, oh, we stole the security manual for the whole Nevada Test Site, and printed it up.
nessie: They let a guy in a wheelchair escape, once. He was a prisoner in San Diego. They were guarding him, and he escaped. I wouldn't hire guys like that. They don't like being humiliated in public, see. That's why they're pissed at you; that's why they're pissed at me. 'Cause, like, I just won't let this kinda shit lie, y'know. I gotta keep bringin' it up, and bringin' it up ... You've been humiliating them in public, twice a year, for five or six years now, right?
squatter: Yeah. Only we don't have to do it any more. Nuclear testing is oh-ver.
nessie: We won.
squatter: We kicked their ass.
nessie:So those guys are out of work now, right?
squatter: Well they're gonna have a job for eternity guarding the crap that was created out there. Some of that stuff's got a half-life of a quarter-million years. There's nothing like job security. But they can't do their job. Anybody ... I'm telling you, you could take a kindergarten class out there and steal nuclear materials out at the Test Site, they're that lame. They think they're good, but they just aren't. We set up, I would guess, dozens of peace poles, dozens. And it got to the point that we were so bold ... I mean, you have to hike everything in there. There is nothing out there but dust and rocks and sage brush and a couple of lizards, and that's it. So we take this peace pole, and we take it way up on this mountain that you can see from the interstate. We took it up on the side of the mountain and we dug a hole and packed in the water and mixed the cement and poured it in and set a peace pole in concrete.
nessie: And you had to hand carry everything in?
squatter: Yep.
nessie: So if you guys were spetznaz, or like, y'know, S.M.E.R.S.H., or something, you'd have been able to capture a bomb?
squatter: Oh, yeah. If I had some government around the world's backing, I can take anything I want. Anything. I'm not looking for the backing.
nessie: (cracks up, falls off couch again) Yeah, right. Earth First! is being investigated like it was a terrorist organization, and the Feds toss your house and they don't even find that lighter, and if you wanted to you could have had a nuke there and Wackenhut wouldn't have been any wiser?
squatter: Yep.
nessie: I love your ass, Jim. You're the very model citizen. Listen, I gotta go. I'm supposed to meet ... I'll be back after dinner.I came back. Jim and Stephanie were finishing off some takeout Chinese food from the corner. Jim talks with his mouth full. Or empty. Or closed.He don't care. It's all the same to him.
nessie: There was something else I wanted to ask you about, OK? So, some evidence got lost?
squatter: Yeah.
nessie: You suspect the FBI was behind this all along, because of this? Could you tell me about this?
squatter: They were kicking the shit out of us in the media, to begin with. They won the first round, flat out. But we started to use all of our energy to turn the media tide back. The first thing we did we threw open our house, which said we had nothing to hide, come look. Then we started to refute the blatantly false shit. Then it went along Ok. They were still sandbagging us pretty hard. And then we had the obligatory, all the organizations do shit to support us. Then we started cranking on our elected officials. Like we figured we're Ron Dellums' district. If anybody in Congress is gonna support us, it's gonna be him. So we start cranking him. And simultaneously to our cranking him, people start calling us like Wilson Riles Jr. You know, (unintelligible) when they released the nail thing, this was ...
nessie: How much later?
squatter: Four to seven days later. They'd been pretty much wailing on us. The nail thing comes out. We find credible evidence to refute it. Undeniable. We tell 'em the trails, how they can check our story.
nessie: Who they? Local reporters? National reporters?
squatter: Everybody. They're calling us. We tell 'em the story. That's all. I think who broke the story was the San Jose ... no, not San Jose ... the Santa Rosa Democrat or whatever. I think they might have been the ones who broke it. But then everybody picked up on it. The House Committee was formed to investigate the investigation. Simultaneous to that the whole case began to slip away. They said that they left the car in a place where it could be tampered with; it was no longer usable evidence for prosecution.
nessie: Where was this place that they left it? Under the overpass down by the Broadway cop shop?
squatter: You figure either there or ... uh ... Yeah, around Broadway.
nessie: Yeah.
squatter: Now you and me both know they have a crime lab in Washington D.C. They can do that (snaps fingers), you know, yesterday.
nessie: Yeah, yeah.
squatter: And this is the kind of case that they do it yesterday. Generally. So, you know, I'm suspicious as fuck. And then they just started blowing their case, and they're looking bad, stringing along, trying to come up with something against them and just coming up big-time empty handed. They musta searched 20 houses and I bet they didn't find a fucking single round of ammunition. or guns in any of them. That's a pretty tough thing to do in America.
nessie: Yep. (Note: My subsequent investigation has led me to believe it was more like six or seven houses.)
squatter: That really starts to shake them. I think that they expected that everybody would have at least one gun, and they could search these houses and they could say, "Look what we found." And they show 20 guns.
nessie: Yeah.
squatter: Right. But they didn't come up with that. They got pictures of one shotgun. That was it.
nessie: Stephanie's?
squatter: Uh-huh. And they searched Seeds house and they really thought they'd come up with something. They fucking came up with one plastic cap pistol. (unintelligible) you know, it's obviously the (unintelligible) the cap pistol. You know, it's just nothing. So bit after bit their case fell apart. The media started to attack them because they have now a woman in the hospital and a guy that's now working the media in his own behalf. Darryl, they sprung 'em on bail. Now he's working the media and he's pretty charismatic and y'know: "Am I gonna blow myself up? Do I look stupid enough to blow myself up?" So we had attorneys up the butt at this point. They were getting nervous, I think they thought we might catch 'em. So they withdrew. I think the FBI is in on it in some way. That's my belief. I don't have a shred of proof.
nessie: Somebody does.
squatter: Yeah, right.
nessie: I wonder what he'll do when he reads this.
