Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9510020091
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The club's vice president - and government informant - Raeford Nelson Thompson has taken to carrying a concealed weapon because of threats.
Two federally licensed firearm dealers brought up on charges have found new careers. One of the dealers, along with two other men, awaits sentencing for weapon violations.
The saga of the short-lived Blue Ridge Hunt Club, a citizen militia in Pulaski County, came to a close with the conviction last month of member William Stump II for possession of illegal silencers.
But while the club may have been dismantled, the anti-government sentiments that brought the group together - and have united militias nationally - live on.
Mullins, who is serving a five-year sentence as part of a plea agreement, says he has no regrets about making his own machine guns and silencers, or organizing the club to prepare for a government attack on citizens.
"If I had to do it all over, I wouldn't change a thing," Mullins said in an interview at the Roanoke City Jail last week. "I still feel strongly there's going to be some serious problems in this country in the next few years. We're going to need some people to get up and do something about it."
Mullins was the one the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was after last year, because of the illegal weapons he had manufactured. After he started the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, with the help of Thompson, others got caught in the investigation when they agreed with Mullins to break gun laws.
The club met three times before the ATF moved in and started making arrests.
As far as the government is concerned, a potentially dangerous group was nipped in the bud before it had a chance to carry out any terrorist acts.
"Would things have mushroomed? Would things have withered?'' asked Don Wolthuis, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the cases. "We don't know, and I'm glad we don't."
The ATF, working with the Virginia State Police and the Pulaski Police Department, arrested three members of the club, another member who also was a firearm dealer, and a fifth man who was a firearm dealer but not in the club. Thirty-one weapons were seized, as well as plans for destroying infrastructure and attacking police if it came down to a battle between citizens and government.
"We didn't arrest [Mullins] 15 minutes after he killed somebody, or 15 minutes after he blew up a building," said Jim Silvey, resident agent in charge of the ATF's Roanoke office. "He was arrested well in advance."
But the prosecutions may simply have reinforced some hunt club members' belief in an out-of-control federal government intent on disarming and repressing its citizens.
Stump, formerly a political activist working in the Republican Party, has come to believe that there is no use working within the political process for change, because common folk have little influence compared with special interests. However, he doesn't believe an armed insurrection is imminent.
"Hopefully, what's going to happen is people will learn to go into the courts and enforce the Constitution," he said.
Stump sees the Constitution as the only legitimate source of federal power. He believes laws passed by Congress in the last 200 years that expand federal authority are unlawful, including the gun laws he was convicted of violating. Stump represented himself during his five-day trial, appearing in court each day in flannel shirts and jeans, with a dog-eared copy of the Constitution in his back pocket.
Right now, the Pulaski machinist is awaiting sentencing and trying to figure out how to serve a lawsuit on President Clinton. Stump is suing him in Pulaski County Circuit Court for $50 million "for exercising undelegated authority in the Commonwealth of Virginia" by bringing Stump to trial in federal court on federal charges.
Militias burst into public consciousness after the Oklahoma City bombing last spring. The movement had sprung up mainly out of anger over the government's handling of the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, and the shooting of white separatist Vickie Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Recent gun-control legislation passed by Congress added to members' fears that the U.S. government is not working in its citizens' interests.
Like the members of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, militia members generally are rural, white, blue-collar men, staunchly pro-gun and conservative, with a deep distrust of the government. Groups are believed to be organized in 40 states.
Militias are a part of the "patriots movement," an umbrella for groups as varied as tax resisters, survivalists, conspiracy theorists and strict constitutionalists.
There is nothing illegal about belonging to a militia; the Constitution even requires it for men over 18, Stump notes.
What concerns law enforcement officials is militias' belief that they need to conduct paramilitary training and stockpile weapons in case the government comes after them.
By the time the Blue Ridge Hunt Club started meeting, Mullins had become bitter with the country's political climate, said R.D. Porter, a member of the club who was not charged. Mullins' mother testified she noticed a change in her son in the six months before his arrest.
When Thompson came to police with information that Mullins had homemade silencers - and plans to break into the National Guard Armory in Pulaski to steal weapons to fight the government - the ATF decided to monitor the situation for a while to see if others were involved, Special Agent Scott Fairburn said. Thompson agreed to wear a hidden recorder to meetings with Mullins.
They talked of creating a diversion across town in Pulaski to distract police, while they and others yet to be recruited broke into the armory and stole M-16 military rifles, rockets and handguns. They would also break into the police department, where the bolts for the M-16s are stored.
Mullins still cannot believe that his friend of 18 years betrayed him. He believes law enforcement officers had something on Thompson that persuaded him to work for them. Thompson, a diesel mechanic retired on disability, testified that he was motivated to be an informant simply "to clean up the community I live in."
Silvey acknowledges he can't remember the last time a citizen volunteered to be an informant; informants usually are people with charges hanging over their heads hoping for leniency.
Thompson, like all informants, was checked out, Fairburn said.
"Every single thing Thompson told us came to fruition," Fairburn said. "Everything Thompson told us about, it was there."
While the ATF had hunt club meetings under surveillance to see if there was a connection between the group and Mullins' other plans, several members were recorded firing rifles equipped with Mullins' silencers. The crude silencers were made of galvanized metal piping, fitted over modified rifle barrels.
The silencers cut the noise of the guns at least in half, an ATF expert testified.
The .22-caliber rifle they were silencing was a squirrel gun, not even powerful enough to be used for deer hunting, Stump argued in his trial two weeks ago.
Mullins, however, said he made silencers for his .22 because "it's one of the most versatile weapons ever made." It's cheap and accurate, and ammunition for it can be found around the world. And, he said, it's the tool of a lot of professional assassins. Mullins was also proficient at modifying guns to make them fully automatic, turning them into machine guns.
ATF agents watched as Mullins created the militia. They gave Thompson money to buy weapons illegally from Mullins and hunt club member Paul Peterson, a Blacksburg firearm dealer. Fairburn also got a convicted felon to go with Thompson to buy a gun from Peterson. It is against the law for felons to own guns, and the ATF had Thompson ask Peterson if he'd be willing to sell one to his companion.
Peterson pleaded guilty in February to violating federal firearm laws and agreed to testify against fellow hunt club members. Another firearms dealer, Paul L. Greene, was found not guilty of illegally supplying a gun part that Mullins used to make a machine gun. And club member Dennis Frith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate gun laws.
But the ATF never found evidence that Mullins had shared his plans with club members for breaking into the armory or any of the other, more extreme, ideas he and Thompson talked about. Mullins was using the hunt club as a screening process to determine how radical the members were, to "see who would be suitable for the inner core" to know his plans, Silvey said.
At the first meeting, members talked about security measures and how, in case they were infiltrated, to give the appearance of an ordinary gun club. They talked of stockpiling ammunition and supplies and learning how to survive in the woods. By the second meeting, members were practicing with silenced rifles. The ATF worried that if it let the group continue, the armory could be attacked.
"The sad irony of the whole situation is a lot of the things that initially started out could have been positive things, like woodsmanship," Porter said. "A lot of the information that could have been exchanged could have been useful."
The tapes of conversations between Thompson and Mullins seem surreal: a retired diesel mechanic and a forklift operator from Pulaski discussing how to take on the country's law enforcement.
"This is not an isolated incident. This is happening all over, right now as I speak," Mullins is heard telling Thompson, relating a conversation he had with someone else. "And you got a grass-roots-level movement right now underground.
"I said this country is arming itself for one of the worst conflicts it's ever seen in the history of this nation; and, I said, this is going to be like Bosnia, Rwanda, and places like that you see on television every evening on the nightly news. That's what's coming here. And, I said, only on a much grander scale."
by CNB