ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 1, 1996 TAG: 9605010070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: JORDAN, MONT.
SOURCE: JAMES BROOKE THE NEW YORK TIMES
RALPH E. CLARK AND HIS PARTNERS received $676,082 in government checks to cushion a variety of farming setbacks over the last decade.
Striding to a fence post on the edge of Ralph E. Clark's ranch here recently, a Freeman in a cowboy hat nailed up a manifesto denouncing the federal government as a ``corporate prostitute.''
Tarnishing this image of rugged individualism, however, a new study of federal payments indicates that, over the past decade, Clark and his ranch partners received $676,082 in government checks to cushion a variety of farming setbacks: droughts, hailstorms and low prices for wheat, wool and barley.
The flow of federal money was not enough to prevent foreclosure on the ranch two years ago, but Clark refused to leave, setting the stage for an FBI siege that has reached its fifth week. Several members of the group holed up on the ranch are wanted on state and federal charges including writing bad checks and threatening to kidnap and kill a U.S. district judge.
Montana legislative leaders said Tuesday they would consider giving the anti-government Freemen a public forum for their views - but only after the Freemen surrender to the FBI.
However, the Freemen appeared to be under the impression they had won a total victory, and were preparing to make their next move known at dawn today, according to James ``Bo'' Gritz, who met with them Tuesday afternoon.
The Freemen members ``were dependent on the helping hand of government, just like everybody else up there in agriculture,'' said Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that researches farm subsidy programs.
``But even by standards of agriculture, hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years - that's substantial,'' added Cook, whose analysts compiled the figures Friday after weeks of studying computer files on subsidy checks issued by the Department of Agriculture from 1985 to 1994.
Documents filed at the Garfield County Courthouse also offer glimpses into the heavy reliance on government aid by the 65-year-old farmer who now symbolizes the anti-government Freemen group. In the 1994 foreclosure sale of Clark's 960-acre homestead, court documents show that he signed a 10-year contract in 1990 to receive an annual payment of $48,269 under the Conservation Reserve Program. Payments were made through 1994, the Environmental Working Group said.
Under this program, highly popular in Montana, farmers agree to suspend production on steep slopes and other land highly subject to erosion, planting it with grass that will not be grazed or cut for hay. Critics of the program, which began in 1985, often call it ``paying farmers not to farm.''
``You'd be a fool not to take it,'' Garfield County Attorney Nick Murnion said. Referring to the Clark clan's skill in winning subsidy payments, he added, ``Everybody in the county knows that's what they have been doing.''
With a population of only 1,300 people, Garfield County received $63 million in farm subsidy payments from 1985 to 1994, the Environmental Working Group said. In the same period in Brusett, the section of Jordan where the Clarks live, 76 farmers received $7.3 million from 31 different farm subsidy programs.
``What stands out about Ralph Clark is the complexity,'' said Clark Williams, an analyst for the Washington group. ``Ordinarily, a family farm is not that complicated.''
Over a 10-year period, federal checks went to 11 entities with interest in the main Clark homestead here - first to Clark; then, from 1988 to 1993, to a corporation in which he was a stockholder; and then, in 1993 and 1994, to a revocable trust in which he had an interest.
``Around 1992, they were setting up revocable trusts as a means of avoiding income taxes, state taxes,'' Murnion said, referring to one of a series of strategies Clark tried over the past 15 years to avoid losing his farm, which had been in his family since 1913.
Clark's financial problems date to 1978 when, following the trend of the time, he borrowed heavily to expand his holdings, adding 7,000 acres to his original homestead. But interest rates soared to 21 percent in 1979, drought struck in 1980, and hail flattened his wheat and barley crops in 1981. By May 1982, the Farmers Home Administration was calling in his entire outstanding debt of $825,000.
``Someone like Ralph didn't start out hating the system,'' said Sarah Vogel, a lawyer who helped him postpone foreclosure in 1982 and who is now North Dakota's agriculture commissioner.
``He was a genuine, old-timey rancher, who grew up without a telephone, who used to deliver mail by horseback because they didn't have roads.''
In dealing with the federal bureaucracy, Vogel said, Clark labored under a hidden handicap: he had never learned to read or write. ``He never admitted it,'' she said. ``I remember driving to the hearing, and he said, `I forgot my glasses at home, could you tell me what that street sign says?'''
To handle the paperwork of modern farming, he relied on his wife, Kay, or his son, Edwin.
Vogel's defense of Clark drew an article in Life magazine and a report by Geraldo Rivera on ABC's ``20/20.'' Following this publicity, charitable donations flowed from around the nation to help the beleaguered farmer. Neighbors said financial help and counseling also came in the late 1980s from Farm Aid, a support group now in Cambridge, Mass.
``Ralph flunked out of grade school, but he had an ability to mesmerize people,'' said Cecil Weeding, a neighboring rancher who is married to Clark's sister, Ada. ``He was a natural con man.''
When Clark and other Freemen farmers had money, they did not always spend it wisely, neighbors said. After winning one stay of foreclosure from the Farmers Home Administration, they recalled, he bought a Lincoln Continental. Bill Stanton, a 65-year-old neighbor who joined the Freemen, was known by neighbors to have spent his federal subsidy checks on things such as a helicopter, a motor home and gambling trips to Las Vegas and the Bahamas.
In the 1980s, opposition to federal aid became heresy here. Jordan, with only 450 people, is at the center of a semi-desert expanse called the Big Open, where 3,000 people are scattered over 15,000 square miles.
A smashed windshield greeted Bob Scott, a Montana environmentalist, when he visited Jordan in 1987 to propose that local ranchers be weaned from federal aid through the creation of a huge deer and bison hunting preserve. ``I remember the Clarks as the ones being the most xenophobic, with the most bizarre ideas,'' Scott recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Missoula. ``One of the Clarks said we were a cult group that was going to bring AIDS into the area.''
Increasingly, subsidy checks became crucial for the survival of the Clark clan. In January 1994, the Clarks led a group of armed men to storm the county courthouse here. At issue was a federal subsidy check that the former wife of Richard E. Clark, Ralph Clark's nephew, was seeking in a divorce payment.
But time was running out for the Clarks in the conventional courts of the land. On April 14, 1994, Ralph Clark's homestead farm was sold for $50,000 to an out-of-state creditor bank. In October 1995, K.L. Bliss, a local rancher, paid $493,000 for the 7,000-acre spread that Clark bought nearly 20 years earlier.
But two years ago, Clark gave up on the courts and stopped leaving his farm. From his homestead, renamed ``Justus Township,'' he signed his name to a series of pronouncements setting up a parallel ``common law'' system of marshals and grand juries. According to the FBI, the Clark farm compound also began to compete with the Federal Reserve, issuing its own currency in the form of millions of dollars in bogus checks.
Two weeks ago, surrounded by federal agents, embittered by federal justice and cut off from federal aid, Clark ordered a follower to nail to his fence the manifesto that began:
``Freemen are NOT a part to the de facto corporate prostitute a/k/a the United States.''
The Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed to this story.
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