Flock on Fringe Declares Itself Exempt From U.S. Laws, Taxes : Extremism: Montana group calls itself Freemen, answerable only to its own courts. Officials call members armed and dangerous.

It hardly looks like “a headquarters of terrorism,” but that’s how one county attorney described it to a jury long before the Oklahoma bomb blasted the term into America’s consciousness.

It is a log house out in the Bull Mountains south of here. It sits on 20 fenced acres, no neighbors within view. The only approach is a dirt road that twists 2 1/2 miles up to the head of a ravine burdened with thick pines and sandstone boulders.

This is not some rough-hewn log cabin; it is a house: four bedrooms, lights, water, TV, computers, faxes, laser printers and shortwave radio.

It’s the home of Rodney Owen Skurdal, 42, and several of his guests. But Skurdal doesn’t own the house. The Internal Revenue Service does. Skurdal and his guests, snug inside, are on the lam.

They call themselves Freemen. The sheriff calls them armed and dangerous.

Of the many fringe groups that have surfaced, or resurfaced, since the April carnage in Oklahoma--militias, constitutionalists, white supremacists--the Freemen seem to have escaped the national spotlight.

Which is surprising. In pursuit of their own vague goals, the Freemen’s ideology embraces elements of all three.

They declare themselves sovereign, bound by no law other than their own Freemen’s courts. In their documents, they contend they derive their powers from snippets of the U.S. Constitution, the original handwritten Montana Constitution, the Magna Carta, the Bible and a U.S. Army training manual.

Under these rubrics they have posted $1 million bounties on scores of public officials, subpoenaed others, threatened to hang lawyers, judges and sheriffs, placed liens on properties, floated bogus money orders, occupied a courthouse, raided a jail and declared war.

They are not so easily identified as, say, camouflaged militiamen tromping around the woods. But they are well armed and the Militia of Montana is an ally. The Freemen’s weapons of choice, however, are truckloads of paper and concoctions of deceptively phony legal documents that lawyers call gibberish and one judge called “a bucket of snakes.”

Their tactic is to overwhelm the legal system to the point of frustration, bully the law enforcement system to the point of fecklessness and clog the court system to the point of paralysis, all at exorbitant expense to the state.

This keeps law enforcement at bay while the Freemen avoid paying taxes and repaying debts, which appears to be a common motive among their ranks.

“A farmer loses a crop to drought, gets in over his head financially, and will not believe it is bad luck or his own fault,” said Nick Murnion. “The Freemen tell him it’s the government’s fault and he believes it.” Murnion is the county attorney in Jordan, northeast of here, Montana’s most isolated town, where the Freemen one day last year took over the Garfield County courthouse and staged a mock trial.

The tactic of paper terrorism, as Murnion calls it, has its effect. At least two of the people living with Skurdal in his federally owned retreat have felony warrants out for their arrest. Two others, heavily in debt to the federal land bank, are holed up at Grass Range in Garfield County.

A sixth was caught with a concealed gun in Roundup last month, clapped in jail and released on $10,000 bond. He has already violated the bail provisions but Musselshell County Attorney John Bohlman doesn’t intend to rearrest him.

“What’s the use?” Bohlman said. “Why issue a warrant if it won’t be served?”

The reason warrants are not served and fugitive Freemen like Skurdal and others are not brought in is called in these parts “Weaver Fever.”

Three years ago an Idaho fugitive named Randall Weaver refused to show up for trial on a gunrunning charge and garrisoned himself in a mountaintop shack. The federal marshal sent to serve a warrant was killed. In the shootout that followed, Weaver’s wife and teen-age son were also killed.

That incident, along with the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., branded law officers as overreactive. “Weaver” and “Waco” have become rallying cries for anti-government militants throughout Montana and the West.

To some in these parts, “overreaction” seems overstated. Last year a tax protester named Martin Beckman attracted 100 sympathizers to a “No More Wacos” rally in Billings to protest an IRS foreclosure on his property. It had been ordered seized back in 1974. It took 20 years to get Beckman out.

The IRS seized Skurdal’s property July 15, 1993. It was put up for sale for $29,000, but so far no one has bought it. So Skurdal stays. Musselshell County Sheriff G. Paul Smith has chosen caution over confrontation.

So has Sheriff Charles Phipps of Garfield County, where Skurdal and one of his boarders are also wanted, along with a Garfield rancher and his two sons and grandson. Fugitive Freemen. Federal marshals with fistfuls of tax-evasion warrants have held back as well in both counties.

“They know we know where they are,” said Garfield County Atty. Murnion. It’s like they’re saying, ‘We’re here, we have guns, and we know you’re scared to come get us.”’

Said Bohlman:

“I can understand caution, but the more these people get away with defiance, the more it emboldens others. If somebody were to take an Army tank up to Skurdal’s . . . well, why not? The IRS owns the place, so it wouldn’t be like taking his property.”

Freeman defiance is not merely passive. When their $1-million bounty posters appeared on fence posts around the countryside naming scores of judges, lawmen, bankers and others, Sheriff Phipps called a Freeman and asked whether he would get the money if he turned himself in.

“Yes,” said a Freeman fugitive, William Stanton, “but you wouldn’t be able to spend it.”

“Why not?’

“Because we would try you and hang you.’

The Freemen first came to Bohlman’s notice in 1993 when he was in private practice and appointed to represent a man charged with speeding. “He told me he would lose in the county but win at the state level where they would recognize real law.

“I knew nothing about the Freemen. This guy had his own brief all ready to file. It was full of quotes and citations. I checked it out. I told him it was nonsense and asked him where he got it. All he would say was, ‘It’s all true, it’s all real law.’

“He believed that. But if we ignore him, as I did, and he files the brief and a court accepts it, we legitimize that belief.”

There’s the rub, said Vicki Knudsen of Roundup, who preceded Bohlman as county attorney. Frustration with the Freemen and their pseudo-legal filings and threats encouraged her return to private practice.

“Our courts bend over backwards in pro se cases,” she said. “Those are cases where a person defends himself. Our system tries to make sure poor people and people less sophisticated have access to the courts.

“Trouble is, once a court accepts one of these asinine Freemen things, it’s in the system. Everybody named in it becomes involved [and] has to respond. It’s not funny. It’s not romantic. It’s scary.”

At one point, Skurdal and the Freemen had actions going in courts in all 56 Montana counties. One of his cases required every federal judge in Montana to withdraw; a federal judge from Oregon was summoned to preside.

“Skurdal has managed to get his trash all the way to the state Supreme Court,” Knudsen said. “Three times. Each time was over a damn traffic ticket. Can you believe it?”

Yes. In form if not substance, many Freemen documents appear at first glance passably genuine enough to fool an unsuspecting clerk. Which is why District Judge Peter Rapkoch called them “a bucket of snakes.”

After they finally had been recognized throughout the state as coming from the same bucket, the judiciary, at length, instructed courts to dismiss every Skurdal document as frivolous unless signed by a licensed lawyer.

Whereupon Skurdal took to shipping his writs and such to out-of-state secretaries of state, where they would be stamped, returned and entered into Montana courts through the back door.

Here’s a sample of a typical Freeman filing. The excerpt is from a three-page single-spaced document claiming the Musselshell County sheriff has no authority to make arrests:

“This Common Law Affidavit/letter, of necessity, in Law, is true, correct and certain, being made in ‘good faith’, and pursuant to MCA, Rules of Evidence, Rule 202 (b) (1) and (11). . . . ‘We Must obey God rather than men.’ Acts 5:29. . . . teste meipso this 30th day of April. . . . “

And so on, driving lawyers dizzy at what might be lurking within the arcana. Often the same phrases, or whole sections, appear in different documents, plucked as needed from prepared discs.

Fighting back, Garfield attorney Murnion turned to his law books and found a statute, never before used, defining a crime called “criminal syndicalism,’ which includes advocating violence or terrorism in various forms. The Legislature, in turn, made it a felony punishable by 10 years in prison.

Last February Murnion won the first conviction under the statute. A 64-year-old rancher named William Stanton became the first Freeman sent to jail.

During the trial, Murnion entered as evidence an 87-page document signed by Stanton listing 157 allegations against Montanans found guilty in a supposed Freemen’s court. These included the judge, whom the defendant at one point ordered the sheriff to arrest.

The Freemen claim a higher purpose than avoiding taxes and jail.

They claim to be setting up local governments, county by county, under authority derived from antiquity just as, they claim, America’s original government developed.

To demonstrate for doubters their system’s validity, they take the trouble to publish their various writs and pronouncements as legal notices in the local Roundup Record-Tribune. The Freemen’s supreme court is listed at the Skurdal address.

A detailed diagram of how the Freemen organize their government and court system turned up recently in “Taking Aim,” the publication of the Militia of Montana.

The article by Militia of Montana leader John Trochmann said that on a visit here last January the Freemen had shown him “the solution” to a problem that had bedeviled him for 10 years. Trochmann recommended that militiamen attend a recommended four-day seminar at Skurdal’s “to learn the concepts.”

“Sometimes you’ll see 15 or 20 cars parked along the road up there,” said Ray Frasca, a retired trucker who raises llamas a mile down the ravine from Skurdal. Frasca said he’d met Skurdal, had a few beers with him at the Brandin’ Iron Saloon on the highway.

Having learned the Freemen doctrine, lawmen believe Trochmann may have decided to return the favor. The day after Stanton’s sentencing, seven men, one of them Trochmann, showed up at the Roundup jail in two cars. They were armed with an arsenal of guns, a bundle of plastic-strip handcuffs and $80,000 worth of currency and gold.

Ominously, one had in his pocket a hand-drawn map of the tiny town of Jordan, with Nick Murnion’s house and office circled.

“The FBI had tipped me and Bohlman that something was up involving both of us and the judge,” Murnion said. “We were ready. The sheriff stopped them, but we had nothing serious to charge them with. I think they wanted to spring Stanton. His conviction hurt their credibility.”

It also exposed two vintage Freemen schemes: fake liens and money orders.

For two years, Freemen filed legitimate-looking lien forms totaling millions against property owners all over central Montana. During the day or two until they were discovered as worthless, however, they were listed on bank computers as assets. During that period, Freemen deposited phony money orders at another bank.

Stanton got caught last October when he misjudged the safe period after “depositing” $3.8 million with Merrill Lynch and wrote a hot check for $25,000 to pay his taxes.

“Those liens were really vicious,” said Vicki Knudsen. “Most people didn’t learn about them until they went to borrow money and were told there was a lien against their ranch. That happened.

“We got it straightened out,” she said. “It wasn’t funny.”