"We Have Been a Paramilitary Organization": How the Police Talk When They Think We're Not Listening

Chief Hite at September 17 City Council meeting.

 “We have historically been a paramilitary organization,” observed Indianapolis Police Chief Rick Hite during a September 17 City Council meeting. “And we serve whoever sits in that chair, regardless of race, gender, creed, or political party. I don’t know what we would do if we had to go to battle, and we had to make a determination, based on past practices, whether or not we wanted to go into battle. … I am a soldier in an army. We serve you in that way…. We should not be in a position where we’re going to have to decide how we’re going to police this city.”

Hite spoke those words in a largely empty chamber, to an audience drawn entirely from Indianapolis’s political class. True, the budget meeting was open to the public, which could attend in person, monitor a live broadcast online, or watch an archived video of the proceedings later. But few, if any, city residents were likely to endure the two-and-a-half-hour-long barrage of bureaucratese that provided the prelude to Hite’s candid invocation of fuhrerprinzip – modified, in this case, to express unqualified loyalty to an oligarchy, rather than a single “leader.”

 

Councilor Robinson (center).

The Chief’s statement was a rejoinder to Councilor-at-Large Leroy Robinson, who had defended his vote in opposition to a $29 million tax increase to expand the ranks of Hite’s “army” by three hundred officers. 

Committing the grievous offense of viewing the proposal from the perspective of the tax victims, Robinson pointed out that the city government over the past several years has spent $286 million on what he called “pet projects and development” – such as expanding the city’s entertainment industry and building new parking garages. A significant portion of that amount – an estimated $120 million a year – is diverted through the Tax Increment Financing Commission (TiF), which is an undisguised slush fund for crony capitalist ventures. 

“It’s kind of unfair and disingenuous to the taxpayers of this city, [since] that public safety tax wasn’t needed,” Robinson insists. “What is needed is a permanent change in priorities…. We tend to pay for what we want, and we tax the people for what we need….For years, we’ve been gouging the taxpayers to pay for our pet projects.” That includes $150 million over the past decade to subsidize the Indiana Pacers NBA franchise, $15 million to build an auditorium, and – in one of the oddest corporatist ventures to be found in the American Midwest -- $6 million to build a Cricket field. 

“The taxpayers believe that this is their money,” Robinson said, committing what must have been perceived as a civic blasphemy. “We have emotionally pleaded for a tax increase” in order to expand the police department, continued Robinson, while shaking down the tax slave population for the benefit of politically favored constituencies. 

Hite's "army" responds to a domestic disturbance.

Robinson appears to be a bright and earnest young man whose mind is still captive to statist fallacies. This is why he doesn’t seem to understand that the political class will never make a priority of addressing the needs of the public from whom they wrest their subsistence. Supplying needs is the job of the market – and this emphatically includes “public security,” the provision of which is decidedly not the true mission of law enforcement. 

Although Chief Hite invoked his experience as a “thirty-six-year veteran of law enforcement” in his response to Robinson, the councilor actually has superior credentials in that field. He holds a degree in criminal justice and briefly served as a bailiff in the Marion County court system before becoming a middle school and high school teacher. 

Hite began his law enforcement career as an aide to former Baltimore Mayor Donald Schaefer, and was appointed to the Baltimore PD, where – purely on the basis of patronage – he was able to retire after 30 years with the rank of Lt. Colonel. He managed to do all of this without attending a training academy or receiving formal instruction of any kind. When Hite was appointed interim police chief in April 2011, he had to receive a waiver in order to become a certified police officer without attending the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy.

In the productive sector, credentials matter much less than ability and performance. In the parasitic sector, credentials matter a great deal more than competence, but they are not indispensable.  Hite was fortunate enough to find favor with a bureaucracy that isn’t picky about matters of “certification” – and the circumstances that led to his appointment as chief reveal a great deal about the institutional character, such as it is, of the “army” over which he now presides.

Hite was appointed to replace former Chief Paul Ciesielski, who was forced to resign for misconduct – including what appeared to be deliberate spoliation of blood test evidence -- in the case of Officer David Bisard, who killed a motorcyclist while driving under the influence of alcohol. 

Bisard was in pursuit of a narcotics suspect when he plowed his cruiser into two motorcycles, killing Eric Wells and injuring Kurt Weekly and Mary Mills. In addition to having a blood alcohol content more than twice the legal limit, Bisard was typing a personal message into his on-board computer at the time of the crash. 

After Bisard was charged with negligent homicide and drunk driving, the trial judge ordered the preservation of his blood sample – which was promptly ruined by being removed from a refrigerated compartment in the property room at police headquarters, and stored at room temperature. 

This was not the only “irregularity” involved in this homicide investigation. Bisard couldn’t explain where he had been with the cruiser during a two-hour stretch on the day of the accident. Despite the fact that he had obviously been drinking, Bisard was not examined for evidence of intoxication at the crash site, and he was allowed to remove personal effects, including a black bag, from the cruiser without supervision. Deputy Chief Valerie Cunningham admitted that this may have resulted in the loss of “valuable evidence” from the crime scene.

Bisard was eventually found guilty of nine DUI-related felonies and sentenced to 16 years in prison, with the prospect of parole after serving 78 months behind bars. 

Last month Bisard filed a motion for a new trial, contending that Judge John Surbeck “abused his discretion” by treating “abuse of police power and breech of public trust” as aggravating factors. A stronger case can be made that Bisard’s identity as a police officer was an asset, rather than a liability, given that a Mundane involved in an otherwise identical incident almost certainly would have been charged with murder. 

An aggravating factor not considered by Judge Surbeck in Bisard’s trial is the fact that he was driving drunk while pursuing an unarmed individual suspected of a non-violent offense. Terrance Malone, described by the IMPD as 5’2” and 110 pounds, was being sought on suspicion of “felony marijuana possession.” At the time of the pursuit Malone was riding a bicycle and was neither fleeing from the police nor resisting arrest. 

“A marijuana warrant isn’t an emergency,” commented deputy prosecutor Mark Hollingsworth during Bisard’s trial.  Yet it was treated as one by the IMPD, which deployed five officers to run down someone suspected of merely possessing a prohibited substance. Bisard, who had consumed a prohibitive amount of a legally permitted intoxicant, volunteered for this engagement in the War on Drugs because he was a K-9 officer and wanted to help his comrades locate any contraband found in Malone’s possession.

Bisard’s indecent eagerness to be part of a trivial drug bust reflects the institutional priorities of the department that employed him at the time. “Forfeiture” proceeds are among the department’s most important revenue streams.

Crash scene, August 6, 2010.

An investigative report published by the Indianapolis Star in November 2010 – just weeks after Bisard killed Wells – found that police agencies in Indiana were “deciding how [confiscated] money is spent, rather than allowing it to go through the normal local government appropriations process.” 

This is done despite the fact that the state constitution requires that all proceeds be used to fund the government-operated school system. The Indianapolis-Marion County Metro Drug Task Force, which had employed Bisard, receives at least one million dollars a year directly out of “forfeiture” proceeds.

During the September 17 budget hearing, Indianapolis Public Safety Director Troy Riggs assured the City Council that the police would continue to use money confiscated through “forfeiture” as a revenue source, despite the fact that this is clearly illegal. He also said that he and his comrades are “trying to be at every conference of major cities” in Washington, D.C. and “haunting every homeland security subcommittee” in order to rake in additional federal law enforcement subsidies. None of this would relieve the burden of the local tax victim population, of course; it would merely enhance the financial advantages enjoyed by the privileged people who plunder them.

No protection: Eric Wells, RIP

Indianapolis does suffer from a shockingly high rate of violent crime, and the added indignity of a police department that is predictably useless in protecting persons and property. Local attorney Gary Welsh trenchantly observes that this is not a problem that will be solved by extracting more wealth at gunpoint from the afflicted population.

“What happened to the $90 million a year in new taxes for public safety in 2007 these lousy bums slapped up with that were supposed to hire all of those new police officers?” asks Welsh. “What happened to the $9 million in savings that was supposed to come from the merger of the IMPD and the Sheriff’s Department [in 2007]?”

Noting that Mayor Ballard is simultaneously demanding a huge “public safety” tax increase, while boasting about reductions in the crime rate, Welsh inquires: “If crime is down overall despite the failure to hire more police officers, how will hiring more police officers reduce crime?”

Welsh is probably too astute an observer to fall prey to the notion that police departments exist to protect the public. In Indianapolis, as elsewhere, the police are a paramilitary organization dedicated to serving the plunderbund, and we should thank Chief Hite for describing that relationship with such compelling candor. 

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Call the Anti-Police: Ending the State's "Security" Monopoly

Dale Brown (center) with Garrett Ean and Pete Eyre.

|"How would things be different,” muses Dale Brown of the Detroit-based Threat Management Center, “if police officers were given financial rewards and commendations for resolving dangerous situations peacefully, rather than for using force in situations where it’s neither justified nor effective?”

Brown’s approach to public safety is “precisely the opposite of what police are trained and expected to do,” says the 44-year-old entrepreneur.  The TMC eschews the “prosecutorial philosophy of applied violence” and the officer safety uber alles mindset that characterize government law enforcement agencies. This is because his very successful private security company has an entirely different mission – the protection of persons and property, rather than enforcing the will of the political class.  Those contrasting approaches are displayed to great advantage in proto-dystopian Detroit.

“We’ve been hired by three of the most upscale neighborhoods in Detroit to provide 24/7 security services,” Brown proudly informed me during a telephone interview. “People who are well-off are very willing to pay for Lamborghini-quality security services, which means that our profit margin allows us to provide free services to people who are poor, threatened, and desperate for the kind of help the police won’t provide.”

“Unlike the police, we don’t respond after a crime has been committed to conduct an investigation and – some of the time, at least – arrest a suspect,” Brown elaborates. “Our approach is based on deterrence and prevention. Where prevention fails, our personnel are trained in a variety of skills – both psychological and physical – to dominate aggressors without killing them.” 

Police typically define their role in terms of what they are permitted to do to people, rather than what they are required to do for them. Brown's organization does exactly the reverse, even when dealing with suspected criminals.

To illustrate, Brown refers to an incident from a security patrol in which he encountered a black teenager “who was walking in a neighborhood at about 3:00 a.m. dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt, doing what is sometimes called `the drift’ – it was pretty clear he was up to something.”

Rather than calling the police – who, given their typical four-hour response time, wouldn’t have arrived soon enough to be of any help, as if helping were part of their job description – Brown took action that was both preventive and non-aggressive.

“I told him, `There are criminals here who might rob you, so you’ll get free bodyguard service anytime you’re in the neighborhood,’” Brown related to me. “I also asked for his name and personal information for a `Good person file’ that would clear him with the cops next time he decided to go jogging in a black hoodie a three in the morning. He didn’t have to give me that information, of course, but he told me what I needed to know – and we’ve never seen him there again.”

Brown and his associates take a similar approach to dealing with minor problems that usually result in police citations that clog court dockets and blight the lives of harmless people.

“When we see someone who is drunk or otherwise intoxicated, we offer to take their keys and call their families to get them home,” he reports. “This way we keep them safe from harm – and, just as importantly, protect them from prosecution. Again, everything we do is the opposite of what the police do. If you have a joint in your pocket, the cops will be all over you – but if you’re facing actual danger, they’re nowhere to be found, and aren’t required to help you even if they show up.”

That contrast is most visible in confrontations with potentially dangerous people. Brown’s company receives referrals to provide security for people who face active threats, such as victims of domestic violence. One representative case involved a young mother whose daughter had been abducted by a violent, abusive father with a lengthy criminal history. The child was rescued and reunited with her mother without guns being drawn or anybody being hurt.

For reasons of accountability and what the private sector calls “quality assurance,” Brown and his colleagues recorded that operation, as they document nearly everything else they do. However, they weren’t playing to the cameras. The same can’t be said of the Detroit PD SWAT team that stormed the home of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones at midnight in May 2010 while filming the assault for a cable television program. 

Officer Joseph Weekley, who burst through the door carrying a ballistic shield and an MP5 submachine gun, shot and killed Aiyana, who had been sleeping on the living room couch. By the time she was killed terrified little girl had already been burned by a flash-bang grenade that had been hurled into the living room. 

The home was surrounded with toys and other indicia that children resided therein, and neighbors had pleaded with the police not to carry out the blitzkrieg. The cops did arrest a suspect in a fatal shooting, but he resided in a different section of the same building. In any case, the suspect could have been taken into custody without a telegenic paramilitary assault – if the safety of those on the receiving end of police violence had been factored into the SWAT team’s calculations. 

Owing in no small measure to public outrage, Weekly has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and careless discharge of a weapon resulting in death. A jury deadlocked on the charges in July 2013. Weekley now faces a second trial that will produce a conviction only if the prosecution can overcome the presumption that the officer’s use of deadly force was reasonable.  This is a function of the entirely spurious, and endlessly destructive, doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which protects police officers from personal liability when their actions result in unjustified harm to the persons or property of innocent people.

Lost Angel: Aiyana.

The rationale behind qualified immunity is the belief that absent such protection competent and talented people wouldn’t enlist as peace officers. In practice, however, qualified immunity merely emboldens incompetent and vicious police officers. 

“Police should be subject to exactly the same laws and liabilities that the rest of us face,” contends Brown. “If we don’t have perfect reciprocity, then police should be held to a higher standard of accountability than the rest of the citizenry. If they commit criminal acts that result in injury or death, police should do double the time that a `civilian’ would face, because they’re supposed to be professionals.”

As private sector professionals, Brown observes, “we have double accountability – first to our clients who pay us, and then to the criminal justice system and civil courts if we do something wrong. And because the police usually see us as competitors, they are very eager to come after us if we screw up. But in all the years we’ve been working, we’ve had no deaths or injuries – either to our clients or to our own people – no criminal charges, and no lawsuits.” 

Not only do Brown and his associates operate without the benefit of “qualified immunity,” they are required to expose themselves to physical risk on behalf of their clients – something that police are trained to avoid. 

“For police officers, going home at the end of the shift is the highest priority,” Brown observes. “For us it can’t be. When we’re hired to protect a client, his home, his business, his family, we’ve made a choice to put the client’s safety above our own, and to make sure that he or she gets home safely at the end of the day.”

When people seek help from the police, Brown points out, they’re inviting intervention by someone who has no enforceable duty to protect them, but will be rewarded for injuring them or needlessly complicating their lives.

“Let’s examine this logically,” Brown begins. “What is this human being – the police officer – going to get out of becoming involved in your troubles? Will be he rewarded for helping you to solve them, especially if this involves a personal risk? Would solving your problem be worth getting injured or killed?”

“We’re dealing with a basic question of human motivations,” Brown continues. “Police are not required to intervene to protect you – there is a very long list of judicial precedents proving this. They’re actually rewarded for not intervening. Here, once again, I emphasize that Threat Management is not comparable to the police. We follow exactly the opposite approach. People don’t have to work with Threat Management, but if they choose to, that’s what we expect of them.”

Some critics of TMC and other private security firms insist that their personnel cannot match the qualifications and experience of government-employed police officers. That objection wildly overestimates the professional standards that must be met in order for an individual to become a government-licensed purveyor of privileged violence.

“An individual can become a police officer in six months,” Brown points out. “Can you become a doctor or an EMT in six months? Is there any other profession in which employees can become `qualified’ to make life-and-death decisions on behalf of other people after just a few months of training?”

By way of supplementing Brown’s point: In Arkansas, an applicant can become a police officer in a day, and work in that capacity for a year, without professional certification of any kind. However, to become a licensed practicing cosmetologist, an applicant must pass a state board examination and complete 2,000 hours of specialized training. For an investment of 600 hours an applicant can qualify to work as a manicurist or instructor.

While Arkansas strictly regulates those who cut hair or paint nails in private, voluntary transactions, it imposes no training or licensing standards whatsoever on armed people who claim the authority to inflict lethal violence on others. This is not to concede that there is any way one human being can become legitimately “qualified” to commit aggressive violence against another.

“Law enforcement attracts a certain personality type that is prone to narcissism and aggression,” Brown asserts, speaking from decades of experience. “People like that get weeded out from our program very early. We protect innocent people from predators, and we can’t carry out that mission by hiring people who are predatory themselves. Our people receive extensive training in firearms and unarmed combat techniques, but they’re also taught to look at all humans as members of the same family. The question we want them to ask themselves is – in what circumstances would you shoot, or otherwise harm a member of your family? They’re trained to apply that standard in all situations involving a potential use of force. People who can’t think that way aren’t going to fit in with our program.”

Brown emphatically agrees that the phenomenon called “police militarization” is a huge and growing menace, but insists that the core problem is “not the military hardware, or the other trappings of militarization, but the system itself. Police agencies attract the wrong kind of people and then tell them, `You’re like God’ – they get to impose their will on others and use lethal force at their discretion. And when someone who is really golden shows up – that is, an ethical, conscientious person who wants to protect the public – they get redirected into a role that will minimize their influence for good by people who are worried about their own job security.”

“Ideally, the best approach would be to abolish the current system and start over,” Brown concludes. “But the very least we should demand would be total equity and complete accountability – which would mean, as a starting point, doing away with this idea of `qualified immunity.’ Police are citizens, and they should be governed by the same laws that apply to all citizens. No exceptions, no special protections.”

Several studies have shown that there are between three and four times as many private peace officers – such as security guards, armored truck drivers, and private investigators – as sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. That fact demonstrates that the security market is completely unserved by government law enforcement agencies. This shouldn’t be surprising, since – as I have observed before – police agencies serve the interests of those who plunder private property, and thus can’t be expected to protect it. 

Police personnel practice aggressive violence from the shelter of “qualified immunity.” The absence of such protection doesn’t deter talented, motivated people such as Dale Brown and his associates – and others providing similar services in Houston, Oakland, and elsewhere -- from seeking employment as private security officers who actually accept personal risk to protect property.

Why not abolish qualified immunity for all security personnel? Critics of that proposal might protest that this would undermine the state’s monopoly on the provision of “security” by requiring its employees to compete on equal terms with the private sector. Which is precisely the point. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

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!