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Tattler's Tale

Ronald Griesacker helped lock up right-wingers, then went to prison himself.

By Mark Kind 

On September 27, Ronald Arthur Alexander Augustus Griesacker will be a free man, more or less, but probably not a Freeman -- because that's what got him thrown into prison 43 months ago.

Griesacker was supposed get his wrists slapped a little bit harder: He was sentenced in February 1999 to 57 months without parole on nine counts of bank fraud, one count of mail fraud and a conspiracy charge stemming from $2 million in worthless checks he'd passed off as government drafts. But he was released from a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, eighteen months early on May 30 and has been shuffling around Wichita, Kansas, halfway houses ever since, according to federal officials. Come the end of the month, he'll be free to return home to St. Mary's, Kansas, thirty miles north of Topeka.

Formerly named Ronald Laycock, he -- along with his wife and their five children -- was adopted in the mid-'90s by retired NASA engineer Ignatius Griesacker of St. Mary's. Father and son both worship in that town's dominant church, the Society of Saint Pius X, a Catholic faction excommunicated by the Vatican for being too conservative.

What's suspicious is that Ronald Griesacker got out of prison so soon, say the investigators, lawyers and militiamen who worked to lock him up in the first place, some of whom call him "John Doe No. 3." After the Oklahoma City bombing, Griesacker blithely hopscotched among his anti-government buddies' fortified compounds in Montana, Missouri, Kansas and Texas, encouraging them to pick fights with the government and making sure they left paper trails. Griesacker may have been the decade's most-successful anti-terrorism government informant: His buddies were sent to prison for decades. In fact, what's really odd may be that Griesacker went to prison at all.

"He definitely, in my opinion, was an informant, because he had real good luck, and everybody he was with had real bad luck," says retired Shawnee County Sheriff's Sergeant J.D. Mauck.

Mauck is peeved because he believes Griesacker (and other anti-government Freemen) victimized many more central Kansans than he was punished for, but state and federal investigators waited until legal deadlines had nearly expired before allowing local police to help with the investigations. There were "tens of millions of dollars [in offenses] that died for the statute of limitations," Mauck says.

In the jittery months after Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and others unknown built the Oklahoma City truck bomb at Geary State Fishing Lake, 80 miles southwest of St. Mary's ("Ryders of the Storm," June 14, 2001), Griesacker went to Jordan, Montana. There, he hung out with Freemen who had proclaimed their community, Justus Township, a sovereign nation and who would later face down federal agents for 81 days. Back in Kansas, he and other Topekans -- all former Kansas prison guards or police officers -- took out ads in a rebel newspaper announcing the establishment of eighteen "Common Law Courts" in Kansas and bragging that they "attended a school of learning, taught by LeRoy M. Schweitzer, Dale Jacobi, Rodney O. Skurdal, Daniel E. Peterson and others of the infamous 'Montana Seven' (all sovereign freemen of irreproachable character)."

Eventually the Montana Freeman compound fell into U.S. government hands. Leader Schweitzer got 22 years in prison. Griesacker remained free but immediately turned up in Missouri Freeman circles, Mauck says. By June 1996, Missouri authorities had cracked down on Freemen in the eastern part of the state. They received sentences as long as seven years, but Griesacker remained at large.

By late 1996, Griesacker was living with the secessionist Republic of Texas Freemen, teaching the same check-writing scheme. He made side trips to visit other militia groups, hooking up with Brad Glover in Towanda, Kansas, whom two Missouri State Patrol troopers were tracking undercover. In May and July of 1997, federal agents defeated the Republic of Texas, and Glover was arrested on charges of attempting to take over Fort Hood, Texas (where he thought Chinese troops were training).

Griesacker disappeared, and members of the Republic of Texas went on trial for mail fraud.

By March 1998, defense lawyers for Republic of Texas leader Richard McLaren theorized that Griesacker had entrapped their client by promoting the bank-fraud scheme while working as a federal informant.

Dallas attorney Thomas Mills determined through phone records that Griesacker was in Oregon. He also discovered a federal warrant for Griesacker's arrest. He faxed the warrant to Carl Worden of the Southern Oregon Militia, who learned that his local police could not find the warrant listed in the national database cops use to check on anyone they find suspicious. Worden tells the Pitch that the feds must have had Griesacker on a leash: They'd been threatening him with arrest on the secret warrant if he didn't help bring down militia groups, but the feds didn't have to worry about some local cop busting him because the warrant wasn't visible in the national database.

Worden got busy. "We found out [Griesacker] was trying to set up one of our local boys here," he says. "I contacted the local sheriff and told him we had a federal fugitive and he needed to be picked up. I faxed the warrant to the sheriff, telling them to contact the federal authorities in Kansas."

Meanwhile, Mills had obtained a subpoena requiring Griesacker to come to Texas to testify. Federal prosecutors had no choice -- they promptly piled onto Griesacker. "The day after we got the subpoena issued, the grand jury indicted [Griesacker]," Mills tells the Pitch.

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