Banks, of AIM, Gets Probation for Having Dynamite

Dennis Banks, a former leader of the American Indian Movement, was sentenced Monday to five years’ probation for illegally possessing dynamite.

Banks, 50, of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, pleaded guilty to the charge in exchange for dismissal of all other charges remaining against him and three other defendants in the 12-year-old case.

Trial had been scheduled to begin here next month after years of legal sparring that included numerous appeals to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Banks; his wife, KaMook; Russ James Redner, and Kenneth Moses Loud Hawk, all American Indians, were charged with possessing 350 pounds of unregistered dynamite and eight guns with obliterated serial numbers.

The weapons and explosives allegedly were found when Oregon state police stopped a motor home and a station wagon near Ontario, just west of the Oregon-Idaho border, on Nov. 14, 1975.

KaMook Banks, Redner and Loud Hawk were arrested at the scene. Authorities said Banks and another man, Leonard Peltier, escaped on foot. Prosecutors said Banks’ fingerprints were found in the motor home, which was owned by actor Marlon Brando.

Peltier later was convicted in the June, 1975, gunshot slayings of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He is serving two life sentences in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kan.

A gun belonging to one of the slain FBI agents was found in the vehicles that were stopped in Oregon, authorities said. They said the vehicles were en route from the Puget Sound area of Washington to the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Banks was a leader of the American Indian Movement, formed in the 1960s to support Indian rights. In 1973, he and other AIM members staged a 10-week siege at Wounded Knee, S.D., to protest treatment of Indians in the United States.