Posted on 06/18/2003 7:51:38 AM PDT by El Laton Caliente
REDMOND, Wash. -- ATF agents stormed into an Eastside business early this morning -- and they were tight lipped about what they're hunting for.
They're still there tonight -- packing up many boxes of evidence.
ATF agents say this is just routine enforcement -- but it looks like much more.
It's all happening in Redmond, Redmond Police are on the scene helping with traffic and security.
Sources tell us that it's the makings of serious weapons that spurred this raid."
"Next thing I know there was ATF people all over the place," said eyewitness Gary Wilson.
Those agents zeroed in on this place -- in a Redmond industrial park.
We've learned it belongs to a business called P-W Arms Incorporated -- that deals in ammunition.
A man who doesn't want to be identified says he's seen piles of old ammo inside.
"Enough to fill a couple of 48 foot trailers -- maybe two or three," he said.
ATF agents, most of them undercover, came prepared for a big haul.
"There was probably a hundred of those officers here - and they swarmed in and evidently there was 6 of these trucks lined up in the street waiting," said John Bovee.
All day they've been hauling crates out of the business. Sources tell us what they found here is guns -- imported in separate pieces so they're legal -- but the parts can be put together to create illegal assault rifles.
Officially -- ATF won't say much at all.
"Only thing I can say right now is that we have an ongoing investigation," said Matt Horace, ATF agent.
The number of agents is large -- the stacks of evidence keep growing -- and the work doesn't seem to be slowing down. Still, ATF insists this is a routine enforcement action-- and people shouldn't worry.
"There's no imminent threat to public safety and we'll be here as long as it takes to conduct our investigation," Horace said.
So far agents have been on the scene about 8 hours. Again, ATF officials won't confirm what this is all about.
But a source tells us this raid is not in connection with a large crime ring or terrorism
It's been said that there is a DEA because Hoover knew drug enforcement would corrupt his agents.
You've overlooked the BATF complicity as a *death squad* in arranging political murders, one reason most gutless politicians are afraid of taking them on. The question is only one of at what level or how high up in the bureau such activities are directed and controlled.
The second Big Mistake of Altamont was the hiring of Ralph "Sonny" Barger and a contingent of Hell's Angels to keep the peace.Barger, it has since been divulged, was an informant and hit man on the payroll of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). When Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver fled the country for Algeria, the ATF negotiated with Barger to "bring Cleaver home in a box." He often made deals with law enforcement in exchange for dismissal of charges against fellow Angeles. Barger was even hired by federal agents to kill immigrant farm labor activist Cesar Chavez, and may well have if Barger hadn't first been arrested by police into the Bay area on a prior homicide charges. 7
The accusation arose in the death of Servios Winston Agero, a drug dealer. In a surprise courtroom maneuver, Sonny took the witness stand and confessed to his arrangement with local police and federal agents. Over a period of several years, he testified, he had brokered deals with Oakland authorities to give up the location of hidden cache's of automatic weapons, mortars and dynamite in exchange for the dismissal of all charges against member of his motorcycle gang. This was a deal he had brokered with Edward Hilliard, then a sergeant at the Oakland Police Department's vice squad. Hilliard refused to comment when questioned by reporters. The defendant admitted for the record that he sold narcotics for a living, forged IDs, and slept with a pistol under his pillow. On several occasions, though, Barger refused to respond to questioning and was fined $3,000 by Judge William J. Hayes for each demurral.
Deputy prosecutor Donald Whyte asked the "spiritual" leader of the Hell's Angeles, an admitted federal operative, to name officers who asked him to "kill someone." Barger squired and claimed that he could not recall, exactly, but att5empted several phonetic variations of a possible name. 8 Even in the courtroom, it seems, he was not about to risk retaliation by government contacts.
But the deal was exposed anyway by ATF whistle-blower Larry Shears. The agent told his story to narcotics agents, and they gathered evidence on the murder plan before talking to the press. Shears announced that Barger had been contracted to kill Chavez, an assassination ordered by agribusiness magnates in the San Joaquin Valley. Chavez was only alive, Shears reported, because there had been delays. The first came when AFT agents insisted that certain files first be stolen from the farm union. The arson of union offices was attempted by hired hands, another delay. Confirmation of these allegations came three weeks later when union officials complained to reporters that there had been recent "arson attempts against [farm] union offices. Others have been riddle with bullet holes, and on at least two occasions, attempts were made to steal records in the union offices."
The next glitch in the Chavez assassination, Shears said, came when the hit man, Sonny Barger, was arrested for the Agero murder. To support his statements, Shears waved a federal voucher at reporters signed by Senator Edward Kennedy, a payment of $10,000 to Shears for services rendered as an informant to narcotics agents and the IRS." 9
In March 1989, according to wire releases, Sonny Barger was convicted with four other Angels for conspiracy to violate federal firearms and explosives laws in a variety of plots to kill members of rival motorcycle clubs. Barger and Michael Vincent O'Farrell were sentenced in US District Court, Louisville, Kentucky, for their part in the transport of explosives with intent to kill. Barger and three others were slapped with additional counts for "dealing with a stolen government manual." Barger was freed on parole three years later. The mystery of his early release was dispelled by the Tucson Weekly in 1996--it seems Barger had a political guardian: "You can talk about the biker tradition," a law enforcement source explained, "the Harley, the patch that they've killed for, but in the end, what's most important is money. Hell's Angeles is represented in 18 countries now. They're probably the largest organized crime family that we export from the US. At the center of this global expansion is Oakland-based International President "Sonny" Barger, who's had his hand on the throttle of Hells Angels' money and mayhem machine since the late '50s, despite occasional prison stints. When Barger was released from prison in 1992, an estimated 3,000 people attended his party.... Some influential people might get bought. I can't tell you that Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell received any money.... I do know that he used his influence to try to get Sonny Barger out of prison." 10
Barger's booze-swaggling, two-wheeling entourage were paid killers. And since the carnage at Altamont, the Hell's Angels have twice attempted to kill the Rolling Stones. In March, 1983, a witness called himself "Butch," his true identity protected by the federal witness program, testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee about plots to kill the Stones. "There's always been a contract on the band," he admitted under questioning. There were "two attempts to kill them that I know about. They will some day. They wear they will do it." The vendetta, Butch said, originated with the killing at the Speedway concert, and was motivated by the failure of the Stones to back the Angel prosecuted for the killing. The first attempt to assassinate the entire band took place in the mid-'70s. "They sent a member with a gun and a silencer" to a hotel where the Stones were staying. The hit-man "staked out the hotel, but [the Stones] never showed up," said the government informant. And in 1979, the Angels' New York chapter "were going to put a bomb in the house and blow everybody up and kill everybody at the party." But this conspiracy sank with a cache of plastic explosives, accidentally dropped overboard from a rubber raft. Killing the Stones, he testified, was an "obsession" with the bike gang." 11
Does this mean we can look forward to the Kennedy compound, which is leased from the Special Olympics by the way, getting A BATF raid or is that hyust for the serfs?
If true, it is not clear to me what a member of Congress is doing in law enforcement. (Or was Kennedy sworn in as a federal marshall too?)
LOL!
I wonder if they still enjoy their "rush" without a good killin'
I mean, it would be a real shame to just have a garden variety raid that didn't allow for some kind of sexual enjoyment..
At one time I believe it was $1/yr bit that may have changed. The terms of the lease are private but suffice to say at least someone got a hefty tax write off for the donation of the property with the lease for however many lifetimes included.
Or, mothers holding their infant child.
Well, in this example, from the corroborating testimony of the BATF agent whistleblower who not only confirmed Barger's testimiony [Barger's out of custody now, BTW, and is now running an Arizona motorcycle shop] but expanded upon it. Note too the timing; at the time that happened John Caulfield and G. Gordon Liddy were both working for the Treasury in the BATF, before they became better known for their Watergate-related activities. And Barger very accurately described what would later be revealed to be very similar to the *Operation Gemstone* plan Liddy later proposed to Attorney General John Mitchell, an eventual convicted felon himaelf.
And in general, from my uncle, a 28-year veteran of the US Secret Service, who, when I was considering a federal law enforcement job and possible career, filled me in on the activities of the BATF [previously ATTU; Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Unit of the Treasury Dept.] particularly in Dallas on November 22 of 1963, and suggested I stay as far from that bunch as possible. If you think the FBI badmouths the BATF agents, you should hear what their [now former] fellow Treasury agents had to say about them.
Uncle Denny had a generally high opinion of the Postal Service and the uniformed officers of the Border Patrol, and for the technical expertise found among FAA investigators. But things have changed in those agencies over the last few years, too.
For more on former BATF agent Larry Shears and his testimony as to the BATF role in covert domestic political activity, see the transcript of Plans to kill Eldridge Cleaver and Cesar Chavez: Treasury Dept. ATF, Larry Shears, Dec. 17, 1971, 5:50 p.m., Channel 23, Los Angeles as reported in the New York Times, January 2, 1972.
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If true, it is not clear to me what a member of Congress is doing in law enforcement. (Or was Kennedy sworn in as a federal marshall too?)
Federal agents and former agents [and sometimes their informents or *lower-case *a* agents] are frequently hired, usually on a short-term or contract basis, for congressional inquires and investigations. They're sometimes removed from their agency payroll and placed directly on the budget of the investigating committee or project, as with the special prosecutor investigations thatresulted in Clinton's impeachment, or sometimes on a per diem basis.
The practice goes back at least as far as that of Bobby Kennedy's *Get Hoffa* squad, with some of the federal agents participating in that operation later finding themselves in supervisory positions under later Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And even the committees other than the usual ones employing the practice, [judiciary, intelligence and operations] have requirements for background investigations on new and replacement aides and staffers.
I don't know right offhand which committees Teddy Kennedy was on then, but he's now on the ranking member on *Health, Education, Labor & Pensions*, the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, the Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Seapower and serves on the Joint Economic Committee, any or all of which could reasonably be expected to be employiong federal cops as staff investigators.
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Oh my..
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