Government attorneys prosecuting members of an Alaska militia based in Fairbanks are wagering that testimony from their flawed star witness will be so powerful that jurors will overlook Gerald Olson's self-serving motives as an infiltrator and mole.
The career con man, drug courier and convicted felon, who testified for the first time Monday, has a long list of enemies, long enough that after ratting out Alaska Peacemakers Militia leader Schaeffer Cox and others in the group to state and federal investigators, he vanished -- pulled into a veil of protection by the FBI.
Earning the ire of drug dealers and paramilitary men with axes to grind against the government was worrisome enough. But he also has a string of victims he's swindled out of money over the years.
RELATED: Sovereign citizens militia members on trial
With Cox's somber, serious gaze trained on his every step, Olson walked into the courtroom Monday and took the witness stand. Through thick, black-rimmed glasses, he looked at the jury and promised to do something that hasn't always come easily: tell the truth.
He'd become a reformed man in recent years, he testified. He'd given up the girlfriend, the drugs, the fraud schemes, all in the hope his wife of 17 years and their four children would take him back.
New, trusted recruit
For prosecutors, opening up Olson to the biting scrutiny of defense attorneys looking to characterize him as an untrustworthy louse is worth the risk. Through him, jurors will be transported back in time to experience the sovereign-citizen culture Cox and his men considered normal.
In summer and fall 2010 and the early months of 2011, most knew Olson as "J.R." -- a trusted new recruit to Cox's group.
Cox and his loyalists had no way of knowing he was there for the sole purpose of betraying them, and betray them he did. Olson allowed investigators to record his every move, yielding more than 100 hours of secretly made audio and video recordings.
On Monday, two weeks into the trial of Cox, Coleman Barney, and Lonnie Vernon on weapons and murder conspiracy charges, jurors got a chance to see and hear what the men were up to during the time prosecutors claim they were getting ready to kill state and federal employees, including members of law enforcement and judges.
Early in the day, jurors became virtual flies on the wall, listening to an August 2010 commissioning ceremony Cox held to induct Olson and other recruits into his Alaska Peacemakers Militia. Young children could be heard coughing and clamoring in the background as Cox delivered his "duty to disobey" corrupt or unjust laws speech and spoke of federal "goons on the ground" he believed had been sent in to assassinate him and his family -- or haul him into a "secret court." Cox believed the government perceived his beliefs as a threat and that it would go to any length to silence him.
In one audio clip recorded as Cox held a meeting to go over his directives for protection enroute to a courthouse and television appearance, he offered a strikingly dire pep talk. If federal agents or law enforcement tried to put their hands on Cox or any militia members after being told not to do so, it would be at their own peril.
"You might have to kill them," Cox told the men who had signed on to be a part of his security detail.
Why Olson, not Fulton?
During the commissioning ceremony, Cox told a story about his recent appearance before a state judge, skewed through hindsight with the sheen of bravado.
Cox, defiant, spoke of how he implored the judge to see that the minor charges Cox faced at the time were being "perceived as a politically-driven attack on the commander of the militia." Cox and other militia members at the August meeting that Olson recorded confirmed that the militia-packed courtroom was a show of force that had "the crazy people in the courtroom shaking in the boots" and ultimately resulted in a deal. "We don't want war," he claimed to have warned the judge.
Why prosecutors are relying solely on Olson and not a second paid informant with no criminal record isn't clear. They won't say why they aren't calling undercover weapons supplier Bill Fulton, who, like Olson, spent months recording the group and disappeared shortly after the March 2011 arrests -- not to mention illegally arresting Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger during a town hall event while helping failed U.S. Senate canidadate Joe Miller five months earlier.
Given that Cox, his co-defendants and at least one trial witness have claimed Fulton often forced violent anti-government rhetoric on the group loudly, it may be prosecutors are attempting to distance themselves from the defense-teams' narrative that any murder plot – if there really was one – was an invention of the informants, not the militia. It may also be that the most valuable surveillance evidence comes from Olson, who got so tight with Cox that he became a trusted member of the leader's inner circle.
Although Fulton won't be taking the witness stand for prosecutors, jurors did get to hear and see him in action. He appeared as a main character in several video clips played late in the day, his back turned to a surveillance camera hidden inside a hotel. Visible was the backside of a dark-colored T-shirt from his military surplus store Drop Zone, emblazoned with the phrase "We do bad things to bad people."
He and Olson never knew they were fellow informants, each believing the other was a person roped into the fringes of Cox's group. During a summit held for statewide militia commanders at an Anchorage hotel, the men found themselves in a hotel room with Lonnie Vernon and a fourth man, Aaron Bennett.
Over beers and booze, Fulton schooled Vernon on the finer points of chatting up weapons suppliers. Don't just blurt out you want to buy grenades in the first few minutes of meeting someone, Fulton scolded. Vernon had made that mistake earlier in the day, and Fulton was unhappy about it. The conversation then turned to discussing the availability of grenade fuses, automatic weapons and custom suppressors for a firearm.
Olson had a lot of baggage when he decided to take the plunge for investigators. He'd already done time for a septic-installation scam. More recently he'd gotten into a handful of entanglements – in Palmer, in Anchorage, in Delta Junction – for running a cabin-building business on Craig's list. But like before, he was doing a lot more money-taking than working. When he went on to steal a tractor he'd rented, he couldn't outrun the reach of the law any longer, and found himself again charged with felony crimes, a situation that jeopardized his probation in the septic case.
His "avoid jail time" remedy? Sign on to nail drug dealers and other dangerous bad guys. Only after investigators agreed to work with Olson did he confess that he'd used his trucking business as a cover to run drugs between Alaska cities and across state lines. Though he'd never been caught, he was returning to the drug word as a narc.
But the government had other targets it needed help with, guys who hated the government and liked guns and grenades. Olson's plan to save his own skin worked. In the summer of 2011, just a few months after the arrests of nearly a half-dozen people, Olson got what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Sure, he had to plead guilty to another felony in the tractor-theft case. But other crimes were overlooked, and he wouldn't have to return to prison. He'd completed dangerous missions, and freedom was his reward.
$77,000 and counting
As a drug informant going after a major methamphetamine dealer, Olson once had to snort some of the drug during a buy.
The dealer, he testified, wanted to make sure Olson wasn't a cop. Using the drugs would prove to the dealer -- who had a gun visible on his waistband and was flying high himself – Olson wasn't a snitch. Olson ultimately had to drive five miles to get to safety and his handler. He estimates he earned about $3,000 for nearly four months of work with state and federal drug teams – far less than the $77,000 he's pulled in so far for infiltrating the militia. Though he's hoping to get paid even more, prosecutors have made no promises, no guarantees.
Olson was a near shoe-in for gaining Cox's trust. As a teenager growing up in Whitefish, Mont., Olson had once joined the Montana Militia. And when militias around the country flocked to aid the standoff between the federal government and the Montana Freeman, another anti-government group, Olson did his part and stood with them for three days.
The man who'd later moved to Alaska and tried his hand at logging and trucking came with militia "street cred" -- a common acquaintance still active in the movement vouched for Olson. By the end of August 2010, Olson was in.
RELATED: Sovereign citizens militia members on trial
In court he wore his reform in a neatly pressed suit coat and pants and in the polite, straightforward manner with which he spoke -- just gentle enough that he was asked to move closer to the microphone to be clearly heard.
Of the more than 100 hours of surveillance tapes Olson helped gather, jurors will hear only a fraction of the conversations. Prosecutors estimate they want to play only about five hours worth of Olson's material for their case in chief, snippets gathered as Cox and his followers held meetings in homes, hotels, public spaces, and chatted in cars.
Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com