Neighbors say neo-Nazi was an intimidating figure

SEATTLE – After listening to complaints from neighbors, state Health Department inspectors were so scared of neo-Nazi Keith Gilbert that they obtained search warrants and brought along more than a half-dozen police officers when they searched for rats in the rental property where he lived.

Gilbert, who once served five years at San Quentin for a plot to blow up the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with 1,400 pounds of dynamite, was arrested Tuesday by federal agents who say he was peddling machine guns. Agents removed about 100 guns from his home, one of many run-down properties Gilbert managed for Seattle brothers Hugh and Drake Sisley.

Gilbert was a follower of late Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler in North Idaho in the 1970s, but later founded his own neo-Nazi group. He served time in the ‘80s for welfare fraud and assaulting a teen from a racially mixed family and other civil rights violations, including spitting on a mentally retarded black girl.

He came to Seattle in the early 1990s.

“He was a thug, hired … to keep the neighborhood and the tenants and everybody else under control,” Susan Baker, former president of the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Baker and the neighborhood association were frequently at odds with the Sisleys and Gilbert over the condition of the dozens of properties the brothers owned around Northeast 65th Street, roughly bounded by Roosevelt Way Northeast and Brooklyn Avenue Northeast.

“He’s a bully,” Baker said of Gilbert. “Very scary. Conducting surveillance throughout the neighborhood. Watching what everybody does. Dogs that are there to strike fear into the hearts of people.”

Hugh Sisley’s attorney, David Vogel, said that Sisley, like everyone else in the neighborhood, was afraid of Gilbert.

Sisley started out decades ago buying up properties by working three jobs at a time, Vogel said. “He’s land-rich, cash-poor. And the way he’s been able to pay for it is to rent them out without having to make improvements to the properties.”

Vogel said Sisley typically rents the houses at “well below the market” rate to a single individual who then sublets rooms or apartments to poor people who are often sick or disabled.

That irked the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, Vogel said.

Gilbert showed up a little more than a decade ago, moved into Sisley’s housing and “convinced Hugh that he had a good way to rent out his properties,” said Vogel.

“Keith became the tenant in a lot of these houses and was essentially acting as a de facto manager. And I think that’s where some of the problems started.”

Part of the reason Sisley liked working with Gilbert, said Vogel, is that if squatters moved into a home, trashing the place, “Keith was less tolerant of that.”

But Gilbert was not Sisley’s employee, Vogel said. Sisley tolerated some of Gilbert’s methods, “But at a certain point, I would say that he was afraid of Keith himself. How do you stop someone like that?” Vogel said.

Drake Sisley told the Seattle Times that Gilbert was “ornery” and surprisingly talented at navigating the Internet to find valuable bits of information regarding zoning and building laws.

“He’s not stupid. He’s obnoxious,” he said.

Vogel and Drake Sisley said that in recent years the brothers backed away from Gilbert, believing he was taking advantage of them.

“When he was taking care of my properties, he shoveled the problems aside, combined them and multiplied them,” Drake Sisley said.

A U.S. magistrate will decide Friday whether Gilbert, 65, will remain behind bars pending his trial on weapons charges that could send him to jail for the rest of his life. Three other men, including Gilbert’s neighbor, William D. Heinrich, have been arrested in connection with the case.