Radical gets light prison term
PORTLAND – Tre Arrow, whose career as a radical environmentalist included a caper in a pink bunny suit, 11 days on a ledge outside a federal office and a stint on the FBI’s most-wanted list, agreed Tuesday to spend two years in prison.
Arrow, 34, pleaded guilty to the destruction of concrete-mixing trucks in Portland and to firebombing logging trucks at a contested logging sale near Mount Hood.
The sentence is much shorter than several others handed down recently for environmental arson, although Arrow insisted he gave no information to implicate others as a part of the plea deal. Nothing said in court on Tuesday countered that.
The plea bargain calls for a 78-month sentence with credit for the time he has served in British Columbia since he was arrested in March 2004 for shoplifting. He was returned to the United States in February.
The agreement was worked out between Arrow’s defense lawyers and the U.S. attorney’s office and approved by U.S. District Judge James A. Redden.
Earlier, Arrow called it a deal he couldn’t refuse. The maximum sentence for the two arson counts, served consecutively, would be 40 years.
He is to serve his time at a medium-security federal prison at Sheridan, southwest of Portland.
Redden said the only reduction in sentence could come from time off for good behavior, a maximum of 54 days a year.
In 1998 and known as Michael Scarpitti, he was arrested in Cincinnati wearing a pink bunny suit outside a Procter & Gamble executive’s home. He moved to Oregon and joined protests organized by the Cascadia Forest Alliance.
He earned fame when he scaled the offices of the U.S. Forest Service in Portland in 2000 and perched on a 9-inch ledge for 11 days to protest a logging sale. In October 2001, he broke his pelvis when he fell 65 feet from a tree after a two-day standoff with police and loggers in Oregon’s Tillamook State Forest.
Arsonist gets 2 years probation
EUGENE, Ore. – The radical environmentalist who helped set many of the arson fires that federal prosecutors called the largest case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history will never set foot in prison for the crimes after a judge sentenced him to probation.
Jacob Ferguson built many of the incendiary devices used by the small militant cell of the Earth Liberation Front that was nicknamed “the Family” and participated in nearly two dozen arsons and acts of vandalism, according to court records.
But the 35-year-old former heroin addict and drifter was sentenced Tuesday to five years on probation in a plea deal reached not long after he turned informant for the FBI and police investigating a series of arsons that caused $40 million in damage around the West from 1996 to 2001.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken also declined to order any restitution.
The people he met during that protest led to a web of secretive relationships among a tiny group of activists who set fires and carried out sabotage across the West for five years to protest forest and wildlife management.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kirk Engdall said Ferguson’s sentencing marked the end of the 10-year investigation called “Operation Backfire” that resulted in 11 convictions, including Ferguson. Three of the 15 conspirators named in a federal grand jury indictment remain fugitives, and one committed suicide in jail.
Engdall said Ferguson took a recorder to meetings with other members of the radical environmental group and broke a “wall of silence” after he turned informant in 2004.
The targets of the arsonists included forest ranger stations, meat packing plants, wild horse corrals, lumber mill offices, research facilities and an SUV dealer. They were often attributed to the Earth Liberation Front or the Animal Liberation Front.
One of the founding members and leaders of the Eugene activist “family,” William Rodgers, committed suicide in Arizona in 2005.
Associated Press