No Protection: The Long Ordeal of Cyndi Steele

Edgar Steele (center), Cyndi (front, left), and their family.

Hey,Cyndi – if something were to happen to you, or Nicki, or Kelsey, or Rex – do you think it would be considered a hate crime? Probably not – the FBI would love to see you dead. So would everybody else, you stupid Kike. 

Hey,Edgar – think long and hard about your buddy Randy Weaver, ‘cause you’re next.F---k’ Kike, n----r-loving f----n’ Jew bastard.

 

Hey,you little Jew bitch – you’re going to hell. Watch out if you leave your house.

Death threats received by the family of Edgar and Cyndi Steele during the 2000 civil trial of Aryan Nation leader Richard Butler

“We are not going to be providing you with any protection,” the federal marshal told Cyndi Steele after she and her son had been ushered into a room in the Kootenai County Courthouse in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. This was not what Cyndi expected to be told. After all, she recently recalled in a telephone interview, “I had just learned that I had been driving around with a bomb on my car.”

That bomb, which had been discovered during an oil change, had been attached to her car by a local handyman named Larry Fairfax, whom Cyndi and her husband Edgar had employed to do some work on their ranch in Sagle, Idaho. 

Fairfax, the man who admitted to planting that bomb, served less than a year in federal prison for “possession of an unregistered firearm” and “manufacturing a firearm.”  He was granted early release to a halfway house in Coeur d’Alene, a facility “that was nicer than most hotels I’ve visited,” Cyndi wryly observes. He is now living less than two miles away from his victim, who was not granted a restraining order “because I was not in a domestic relationship with him,” she reports.

Edgar Steele, who was convicted – largely on the strength of Fairfax’s self-serving and self-contradictory testimony – of plotting to murder Cyndi, died last Thursday (September 4) in the federal prison in Victorville, California, where he was serving a 60-year sentence. 

The jury in the federal trial, which was held before Judge Lynn Winmill in Boise, consisted of eleven women and one man. The prosecution used voir dire to exclude from the panel any potential juror with specialized knowledge of acoustics or explosives, and to weed out anybody who evinced hostility or even skepticism toward the federal government. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that the jury was specially crafted to be receptive to the prosecution’s narrative, in which Edgar, a man in his 60s, supposedly hired someone to kill his middle-aged wife in order to allow him to take up with Tatyana Loginova, a nubile Ukrainian woman with whom he had been conversing online. 

Cyndi insists that those online chats were part of Edgar’s research into what he described as an extortion scam being run out of the former Soviet Union. However improbable that story might appear, it is more plausible than the idea that an embattled political dissident, facing constant scrutiny by the Feds death threats from politically connected enemies, would conspire to murder the wife who had nursed him through several cardiac-related health crises. 

That matter was rendered moot by the fact that the alleged victim didn’t believe for a peeled fraction of a split second that her husband had arranged to kill her, and never filed charges against him. In anticipation of Cyndi’s refusal to collaborate, FBI agent Michael Sotka, who orchestrated the operation, paid Fairfax $500 and sent him to Oregon to make a phone call to Steele’s home, thereby forging the “interstate nexus” used to justify prosecuting him in federal court. 

As both Cyndi and Edgar told the story, when Fairfax came to work for them he was upside-down on his mortgage and facing foreclosure. His prospects brightened considerably after he was able to make a substantial payment to the mortgage holder by cashing in a considerable amount of silver coins he had acquired from the Steeles.

Cyndi and Edgar insisted that Fairfax, who had the run of their property, stole about $45,000 in silver from them. Fairfax claimed that he had been given the silver by Edgar as payment in a murder-for-hire plot targeting his wife and mother-in-law. Supposedly stricken by remorse – or, perhaps, to cover up his theft -- Fairfax went to the FBI, who fitted him with a digital recorder and sent him back to the Steele family’s ranch to discuss the alleged plot. 

 

Fairfax

No original copy of exists of the digital recording from that June 10, 2010 conversation. Special Agent Michael Sotka violated Bureau procedures by purging it from his recorder after using a computer to upload the digital file to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. He did this without a second agent being present, as regulations specify. 

Sotka and an Idaho State Trooper named Jess Spike visited Edgar Steele the following day – June 11, 2010 – to tell him that his wife and mother-in-law had been killed. They later admitted that this was a “ruse” intended to prompt Steele into saying or doing something that would incriminate himself in the crime. 

Steele, a self-described white nationalist, was an attorney involved in civil litigation on behalf of unsavory and disreputable clients, such as Richard Butler of the Aryan Nation white separatist group. (For reasons made obvious by the photograph accompanying this essay, I have no affinity for that ideology.) Steele had represented Butler ten years earlier after a lawsuit had been filed against his neo-Nazi clique by the equally reprehensible Southern Poverty Law Center. Since that time, he and his family had received numerous death threats, some of which alluded to possible lethal retaliation by the FBI. 

Understandably, his first reaction to the grim news on June 11, 2010 was to believe that his family was under siege, and that the federal agent in his living room might well be working in concert with his enemies. Although his wife and mother-in-law were unharmed any suspicions Steele harbored about the role played by the Feds were entirely vindicated. Despite the fact that Edgar did nothing to indicate guilty foreknowledge of the supposed bombing plot, Sotka arrested him anyway. 

At the time, Cyndi had traveled from Sagle to Oregon City, Oregon to visit her mother. Nobody told her about the pipe bomb that had been affixed to the undercarriage of her SUV, or a similar device that had been attached to Edgar’s Cadillac. She discovered the bomb – which, it was later disclosed, was essentially a stage prop incapable of being detonated – shortly before going to the courthouse to attend Edgar’s preliminary hearing.

“They played the recording [of the supposed conversation with Fairfax] at the time, and my first reaction was that it didn’t sound anything like Ed,” Cyndi told me. “They played it to me on a couple of other occasions, and every time it changed. In the first version, it was possible at one point to hear the word `bomb,’ but when I heard it again that had been changed to `car bomb.’”

The recordings were analyzed by forensic scientist Dr. George Papcun, who has served as an expert witness and advisor on behalf of numerous law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Papcun, who is among the most qualified and respected specialists in his field, detected roughly 300 “transients” and other anomalies in the recording, leading him to conclude that there was “a reasonable degree of scientific probability that they [the recordings] do not represent a true and valid representation of reality and they are unreliable.”

During Steele’s May 2011 trial, the prosecution attempted to exclude both Dr. Papcun’s report and his testimony. Judge Winmill initially ruled that Papcun, who was on vacation in Bora Bora, would be allowed to offer testimony via interactive video conference. 

The prosecution objected, claiming that this arrangement would not permit them to “confront” the witness – a right guaranteed to the defense, not the prosecution, by the Sixth Amendment. On May 3, Winmill reversed himself, ruling that Papcun would be permitted to testify only if he were physically present no later than 8:30 a.m. the following morning – which was a physical impossibility. Both Papcun and the defense were willing to pay the expense necessary for the witness to appear on May 5, but Winmill insisted that he simply couldn’t spare another day in order to allow the defense to present its case.

By way of contrast, Winmill permitted the prosecution to present a video-recorded deposition by Tatyana Loginova, the young Ukrainian woman and supposed object of Steele’s extra-marital affecton, who was deposed at a US consulate in Kiev with the help of a Russian language translator. 

The evidence against Steele (as I have documented in ample detail elsewhere) consisted of a doctored audio recording, the testimony of an admitted liar and attempted bomber, and a self-serving video deposition by a foreign national from a dubious background who was shielded from effective cross-examination. During jury selection, Assistant US Attorney Traci Whelan subjected potential jurors to invasive scrutiny regarding potential “hidden biases” against “the United States Government.”

“The judge actually instructed the defense on several occasions not to present anything [or] ask any questions, or make any objections that would make the government look bad,” observed attorney Wesley Hoyt, who represented Edgar in his appeal. “We used to have something called the presumption of innocence.... Anybody who was accused of a crime was presumed innocent … the government had to put on enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person was guilty. Now there’s a presumption of governmental regularity and correctness. What that means is that the court presumes that everything that the government does is in the regular course of business, and that it’s normal, and it’s OK, and it’s correct.” 

Whatever the merits of the federal case against Edgar Steele, the prosecution did not convince the most important jury – the supposed victim.

“From the very beginning they treated me with hostility,” Cyndi related to me. “They did nothing to warn me about having a bomb on my vehicle, then after it was discovered I was explicitly told that I could expect no protection.”

Larry Fairfax, the man who admitted to placing that bomb on Cyndi’s SUV, was ordered to pay her the sum of $900 in compensation. Her husband, who had no hands-on role in the matter, was sent to prison for life. The only “protection” Cyndi received was from a man she was convinced had done him no harm. 

“The last time I saw Ed was in November 2011, while he was in the county jail waiting to be transported to prison,” Cyndi recalls. “Our kids were able to visit him in California, but I wasn’t permitted to. We did speak on the phone often, and I was concerned about the fact that he was suffering from severe medical neglect.”

During the months leading up to his arrest, Edgar had experienced severe heart problems and suffered an aneurysm that was nearly fatal. In prison he contracted pneumonia that was left untreated for several weeks. When he tardily received treatment, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. 

About three weeks before he died, Edgar stopped calling, which left Cyndi frantic.

“We were talking about twenty times a month, so the absence of phone calls from Ed was alarming,” she told me. “I couldn’t find out how he was doing. Nobody at the prison would tell me anything. On the day before he died I got a forwarded email from an inmate who was watching Ed’s back that made me very concerned about him. He had been taken from Victorville to testify at a trial in West Virginia, and when he got back Ed was unrecognizable to him.”

“I got back on the writ 6 days ago, and the next day, Friday, Edgar went to the hospital,” wrote the inmate, Jake Laskey, on September 3. “He got back from hospital yesterday and didn’t know who he was nor what unit he lives in, and … he’s back in a wheelchair. I saw Edgar today at lunch. He was being pushed back to Medical and barely recognized me, He was half naked in his wheelchair, skinny as a skeleton, unkempt, and his mind was gone.”

Cyndi hastily made arrangements to fly down to California to meet her children and visit with her husband on September 5. Those plans dissolved after Cyndi received a terse and unexpected phone call from a local mortuary asking what “arrangements” she wanted to make for the disposition of Edgar’s remains.

“The prison administration never contacted me,” Cyndi told me, weary bitterness shading her voice. “We hadn’t been told he was sick, let alone that he was near death. Even now, several days after he passed, the prison hasn’t given me official notice.”

"Think hard about Randy Weaver": Ruby Ridge, 1992.

One need not sympathize with Edgar Steele’s views about race to appreciate his willingness as an attorney to defend the rights of clients widely regarded to be despicable. One need not be persuaded of his innocence to entertain abundant reasonable doubt regarding the federal case against him. 

The contrast between the draconian punishment inflicted on Steele, and the solicitude displayed by the Feds toward the self-confessed “hitman” amply justifies the belief that Steele was, at best, the victim of selective prosecution – and, at worst, a political prisoner who was effectively murdered by the Regime through focused, deliberate neglect. 

If Cyndi had been an actual crime victim, she would have been notified that the man who tried to kill her was dead. But that isn’t the case: Larry Fairfax, the man who placed the bomb on Cyndi’s SUV lives just down the street, in the house he paid for with money he claims to have received as part of the plot to kill her. 

Cyndi complains that the Feds lied to her persistently from the moment her husband was arrested, but they told her one incontestable truth: They said that she and her family – who had endured death threats for years -- wouldn’t receive any protection, and made good on that promise. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

If We Prick the State, Does It Bleed?

 

Yes, these are Oregon Sheriff's deputies,

“The taxpayers are entitled to everything Mr. Esbensen cost them,” declared Malheur County District Attorney Dan Norris, affected piety suppurating from every syllable, during an August 28 hearing before visiting Judge Gregory Baxter in the County Court. 

William Esbensen, the man from whom Norris and his office was seeking tens of thousands of dollars in “restitution,” had not cost the tax victims of Oregon’s government so much as a fraction of a cent. He had neither the means to extract money from them by force or fraud, nor the inclination to do so. 

Norris and his comrades, on the other hand, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute Esbensen and his associates for the supposed crime of providing medical marijuana – recognized as a legitimate palliative remedy under Oregon law -- to willing clients on terms agreeable to both parties. This was a purely discretionary prosecution, given that by the time Esbensen and his business associate Raymond Scott Kangas went on trial this spring, the statute under which they were indicted had lapsed. 

For operating the 45^th Parallel medical marijuana co-op in Ontario Oregon, Esbensen and his professional associate, Raymond Scott Kangas, were convicted of “racketeering” on June 6 following a bench trial. The public weal did not benefit from that conviction, nor was the public fisc depleted by it. To the contrary: Both the Malheur County DA’s office and the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office have profited tremendously as a result of fines and money seized through “asset forfeiture.” 

Norris and his special deputy DA, Michael T. Dugan, had originally hoped to send Esbensen and Kangas to prison. However, Dugan committed an amateurish tactical error: He prosecuted the pair for a “level 4” RICO felony, while asking Judge Gregory T. Baxter to sentence them under “level 8” guidelines. Judge Baxter refused to sentence the defendants under the higher standard – but he did grant the prosecutor’s request for “restitution” costs.

What this should have meant, at very least, would be a detailed and fully transparent accounting of the expenses involved in trying to imprison Esbensen and Kangas for no compelling reason. Norris and Dugan have spared no effort to prevent that kind of disclosure, and in doing so they have oscillated between furtiveness and fury in a fashion strongly suggestive of a bad conscience. 

During a “restitution hearing” that began on August 20, Dugan was voluble about his demand that the defendants pay a sum of between $28,000 and $34,000. This was justified, he insisted, because of his own legal fees, the expense of paying the DA office staff, and rental of office space within the Malheur County Courthouse.

Under cross-examination by defense counsel Gary Kiyuna, who represented Kangas, Dugan admitted that the DA’s office staffers are salaried employees who represent a constant expense. Similarly, the office space used to prepare for the 45^th Parallel case was already paid for. Norris cryptically insisted that imposing “rental” expenses on the defendants was justified under the terms of a “federal grant” provided to the DA’s office.

When her opportunity arose to cross-examine Dugan, attorney Susan Gerber, who represented Esebensen, was permitted to ask a single question: How much money did the DA’s office receive from the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office?

The question had barely escaped Gerber’s lips when Norris vaulted to his feet to lodge and objection. 

Gerber patiently tried to explain that since her client was expected to pay prosecution costs, it was entirely appropriate to ask whether those costs had already been paid – and that there was evidence of potential “double-dipping” by the DA’s office. This would include tens of thousands of dollars seized from Esbensen and given to the Sheriff’s office in the form of “asset forfeiture” – at least some of which had been turned over to the DA. This was why she suggested it might be necessary to depose Norris himself about the financial workings of his office.

At that point Judge Baxter erupted in fury, complaining that Gerber’s question suggested an intention to “drag this out for another six weeks.” He tersely announced that the hearing would be adjourned and re-convened on August 28—and then stormed away from the bench. 

The astonished silence prompted by Judge Baxter’s departure was broken a second later by Norris’s hissing, derisive parting remark to Gerber that her question was “The most unprofessional thing” he had witnessed during his decades of legal practice. 

The “professional” course of action, apparently, was for Gerber to demur while her client was saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in “restitution” costs to which the DA’s office was probably not entitled by statute, and for which it could not demonstrate a financial need – and that were generated by a gratuitous prosecution based on an outmoded statute.

On the following day, Dugan issued a notice that the Malheur County DA’s office would be filing a motion in limine to forbid “any argument regarding the use of County General Funds” – which would include “forfeiture” proceeds shared with the DA by the Sheriff. When the “restitution” hearing re-commenced on August 28, Baxter eagerly granted that motion, thereby suppressing any inquiry regarding transfers of the “forfeited” money from the Sheriff to the DA, or any suspected financial improprieties.

As it happens, Dugan had already acknowledged, in his sentencing memorandum, that the Malheur County Sheriff had “received, through equitable sharing … $30-$40,000” in cash stolen by police during a search of Esbensen’s home. “Equitable sharing” is the process through which local police agencies turn over stolen money and property to their federal “partners” – usually the DEA – in order to place the plunder beyond the reach of state law. The Feds take a cut and then give the remainder back to the local affiliates of their criminal syndicate.

From the beginning of the 45^th Parallel case, the Malheur County DA’s office had planned to use at least some of the money stolen from Esbensen to prosecute him. During an April 10, 2013 County Commission meeting, according to the official minutes kept by the County Court, “Mr. Norris suggested that a portion of the forefeiture funds in the task force budge could be used to assist with Mr. Dugan’s contract; Mr. Norris indicated he had previously visited with Sheriff Wolfe about this.”

When the Commission discussed the DA’s budget on January 29, of this year, Norris was apparently feeling pretty flush.

“There’s money in the payroll costs line item” to pay for the 45^th Parallel prosecution, Norris assured the commissioners. “I looked at it before I hired him to make sure that I had the money. That’s why I … underspent in the salary cost line item, which is more than enough money to do what we agreed on in the April 10^th meeting.”

“I’m not asking you for another dime in my budget,” Norris insisted a few minutes later.

In the interest of specificity, City Judge Don Hodge said to Norris, “you’re telling me you’ve got enough money in your budget to do that.”

“I’ve got enough money in my budget to [do] that,” Norris confirmed. “I am underspent on a $279,935 line item by 8% right now.”

The fiscal situation had clouded up a bit when Norris met with the Commission again on February 12. Despite the fact that Norris claimed once again that “I am not coming and asking for money,” he asked the commissioners to hit up their tax victims for another $28,000 to pay for Dugan’s contract as a deputy DA. He also assured them that “we are going to have a discussion in a few weeks when I have my other partners in the room regarding the forfeiture money and where we’re going in the next fiscal year.”

Owing to what appeared to be the Commission’s growing unease over the 45^th Parallel case, Norris had Dugan address the body during its April 9 meeting. Dugan bragged that the High Desert Drug Enforcement Task Force had “recovered a number of globs of money so to speak” including “some $53,000 in cash [that] was seized; that was subject to federal forfeiture…. I believe Sheriff Wolfe received about 40 grand of that.”

By prosecuting the 45^th Parallel defendants under the RICO act, “the state can recover the costs of its prosecution,” Dugan continued. In previous agreements with 45^th Parallel defendants “we settled I think about 10 of them with some significant compensatory fines or fines that cover the costs of prosecution; those went into the Sheriff’s forfeiture account to help cover the cost of prosecution and investigation. I do not know the total figure of money that we’ve already recovered but I think it is in excess of 79 or 78,000 dollars and there is still some additional opportunity to recover more.”

Among the anticipated “opportunities” mentioned by Dugan were an estimated thirty-five thousand dollars “in prosecution costs that I’m asking the judge to impose against the first RICO defendant” – meaning Esbensen -- and “another 2,000 or 3 for the second RICO defendant and it just keeps going up that way.” While Dugan specified that “for the most part we’re doing cash” seizures, he suggested that the Commission might want to target some of Esbensen’s properties in Idaho for confiscation as well.

During that meeting, Norris told the commissioners that “the only thing that we need to deal with today is the Sheriff and I have communicated about using some of the money that’s already been collected to put $7,000 into whatever line item it takes to pay for 200 more hours so that Mr. Dugan can finish the 45^th Parallel case.” Once the case is concluded, he explained, it would be possible to “have more in-depth discussions about additional collections and additional use of that money to see things through and do forfeitures next year. Which I think, from a business standpoint would make sense.” (Emphasis added.) 

Is that it? Burying seized marijuana, 9/13/2012.

Briefly put: Norris was asking for a transfer of “forfeiture” funds from the Sheriff’s office in order to finish the 45^th Parallel prosecution, so that his office continuing its ongoing “business” enterprise – which will involve further seizures of money and property. 

The “business” of the DA’s office is best described as federally licensed larceny, which arch-prohibitionists like Norris and Dugan consider a more respectable undertaking than providing marijuana to people suffering from chronic pain and similar conditions.

By the time Norris met with the Commission on June 4, the 45^th Parallel case was nearly completed, and the relationship between the Commission and the DA’s office had degenerated dramatically. Norris peevishly complained that the Sheriff’s office controlled $15,000 in forfeiture funds used to pay Dugan for the prosecution, describing this arrangement as “a very personal insult to the district attorney and the office.”

“I don’t like that you continually insinuate that somehow we haven’t followed the budget rules,” County Administrative Officer Lorinda DuBois chided Norris at one point. The forfeiture money was in the task force budget and could be used to pay for prosecution expenses, she pointed out, and “there’s no muddy waters, except for what the district attorney is doing.” (Emphasis added.)

Why did Norris describe this arrangement as a “personal insult”? Why was he determined to have personal control over the forfeiture funding to pay the expenses of a prosecution for which he had supposedly provided an adequate budget at the beginning of the year? Why was he deliberately obfuscating what appeared to be a rather straightforward budget arrangement, as Commissioner DuBois observed?

Most importantly: Why didn’t Norris – who isn’t inundated with work – prosecute the 45^th Parallel case himself, thereby minimizing the burden of the long-suffering taxpayers whose plight he so tenderly described during the August 28 “restitution” hearing?

Unless a forensic audit is conducted of the Malheur County DA’s office, the answers to those questions will not materialize. Given his holy zeal for the financial interests of Malheur County tax victims, Norris should welcome such an inspection – unless, of course, that solicitude was merely cynical courtroom posturing. Oh, heaven forfend that such a thing would be true.

By obtaining a court order forbidding questions about the use of “general County funds” in the 45^th Parallel prosecution, Norris and Dugan provided cover for their partner in federally licensed larceny, the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office. In addition to an unspecified about of money seized through forfeiture, the MCSO had taken possession of a huge number of mature marijuana plants that were confiscated by the High Desert Drug Enforcement Task Force from at least eight locations in Oregon and Idaho on September 11, 2012.

 

Through a public records request, I obtained a disc containing what Undersheriff Travis Johnson described as “photo documentation of the marijuana” seized during the 45^th Parallel case “being disposed of at the land fill in Malheur County.” 

No, really -- is that it?

The photographs provided to me display a quantity of marijuana that would be the yield from a relatively modest backyard “grow” – or so I’ve been informed by people involved in the legal cultivation of medical marijuana. Recall that the September 11, 2012 crackdown targeted at least eight locations. Obviously, there is a significant volume of a very lucrative cash crop that has yet to be accounted for by the MCSO.

Citing the official transcripts of County Commission meetings during the August 28 restitution hearing, Susan Gerber attempted to make an official appellate record regarding the DA office’s financial irregularities.

In his reply, Norris took refuge in the kind of language he would, in a different context, describe as a sleazy defense attorney’s verbal subterfuge: “There’s no admissible evidence supporting her allegations, Your Honor.”

Bear in mind that the non-admissible evidence, which Norris described as “hearsay,” was drawn from the same official County Court Minutes he clearly considered to be authoritative during his arguments with commissioners regarding the budget. 

Eight grow sites -- and THIS is the yield?

After Judge Baxter granted “restitution” costs to the DA’s office, Ms. Gerber asked that the fines be held in abeyance pending an appeal.

“This isn’t the old days when restitution was based on the defendant’s ability to pay,” insisted Norris. “This is about what it cost the State.”

Those words were commendably free of pretense: Norris didn’t care about the expenses inflicted on the productive people whose property is mulcted to pay his salary; he was interested only in maximizing the drug-related profits acquired by people acting in the name of the “State.”

Norris seems to conceive of the State as living composite being, a personage suitable for an adapted version of Shylock’s famous soliloquy – it is “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer,” as the rest of us.

If you were to prick the state, Norris might ask, does it not bleed?

In substantive terms, the State is a malignant fiction invoked to justify seizing the property of people like Bill Esbensen and Scott Kangas, who have done no injury to anybody – least of all tax-fattened hyenas like Dan Norris and Michael Dugan. Of their ilk we might appropriately ask: If they bleed us, are they not pricks? 

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Dum spiro, pugno!