
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 23, 1995                   TAG: 9504250036
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ATF AGENT SAYS CLUB WAS MILITIA IN MAKING

A local agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says that when his office infiltrated a Southwest Virginia "hunt club," it squelched what might have become a paramilitary group of the sort being investigated in connection with Wednesday's Oklahoma City bombing.

"We got in on the ground floor," said Jim Silvey, resident agent in charge of Roanoke's ATF office. "We had the ability to neutralize them early on."

Five members of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, a fledgling militia group based in Pulaski, were charged last summer with conspiracy to commit firearms violations as well as individual weapons charges. The 15-member club met only three times, but vice president Nelson Thompson - acting as an informant - was wearing a recording device all along.

ATF agents also confiscated a computer disk in club president James Mullins' house containing notes about "guerrilla warfare actions" the group wanted to carry out, according to court testimony.

Silvey said in July that this was the first activity of this kind in the area. But he said this week that there are more people like the members of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club.

Like most of the other militia groups nationwide, Mullins and the others got together after the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, two years ago. The events at Waco, militia members say, demonstrate how the federal government is slowly restricting the constitutional rights of Americans, especially gun rights.

Silvey said he doesn't know if the Pulaski group had any ties to larger militia groups, like the one in Michigan under investigation in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing.

Bill Stump, a member of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club scheduled to be tried this week in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, said Saturday that he had only one comment on the bombing.

"I believe that anybody who blows up a building where they know there are women and children ought to be prosecuted, whether they are United States officers or not," he said.

by CNB