you [Music] in Vail Colorado the nation's busiest ski resort was hit today by a fire arson is suspected you may have heard of the Earth Liberation Front of the Attorney General himself says it's a domestic terrorist organization the FBI says it is one of the most dangerous groups in the country but EMF has claimed responsibility for more than two dozen major acts of eco-terrorism since 1996 fire bombings included tax on lumber mills wild horse corrals and two meatpacking plants so far not one of
the cases has ever been solved and authorities acknowledge they know next to nothing about the membership or the leadership of the organization [Music] on December 7th 2005 for federal agents entered my wife's office and arrested one of her employees Daniel McGowan it was part of a nationwide roundup that eventually netted 14 members of the radical environmental group the Earth Liberation Front in all their trail of destruction resulted in millions of dollars of property damage today's indictme
nt is a significant step in bringing these terrorists to justice weeks after his arrest Daniel's sister put up everything she owned for bail and he was placed on house arrest in her apartment to wait for trial in 2001 I was involved with the Earth Liberation Front and I was involved in two separate arsons in one year I think like people look at my case they think what if that [ __ ] burnt down my house I think people think it's just a bunch of young crazies walking around gas cans letting lighti
ng on fire that pisses them off like and then they think what if I burnt things that piss me off that's kind of crazy you know which it is kind of crazy but I think people just need to understand that this thing is complex and it's not that simple it's hideous to be called a terrorist there was no one in any of these facilities no one got hurt no one was injured and yet I'm facing life plus 3 or 35 years I split my time between talking my lawyers I do a lot of research on my case you know all my
legal documents DVDs and CDs of video and photos audio tapes hi this is Daniel McGowan I know that my lawyer sent you the brief that is being filed with the court today but it's basically as Daniel is preparing for trial the government is putting pressure on him and his co-defendants to take a deal either they plead guilty and testify against each other or go to trial and risk life in prison I told my lawyers at our first meeting don't ever bring up cooperation as a tactic we're never gonna coo
perate you don't have that card in your back pocket don't bring it up all the people in this group I've had conversations back of the day about this like you know you got arrested just don't say we're just get a lawyer and like we'll you know join up and we'll see what happens okay thanks Andrea I'll talk to you soon my family's done a tremendous amount of stuff for me I mean letting me live here but we choose to live our lives very differently like I compost I I have never used a dishwasher in
my life until I moved in here and I try to not not to impose my way of doing things on anyone here because yeah we have different ways to doing things no I don't think I need that because we paint every edge all right all right bye I'd be a liar if I called myself an environmentalist I mean I care about the environment I think about the environment um I recycle but I don't recycle every single piece of paper like Danny does you know when he came home from college he lived with me in Rockland one
day I came home and he took the label off every single can good I had because he was like so obsessed with recycling he was like if we recycle we have to take the labels off the cans I said but you took the labels off every can I don't even know what I have in the cans now I don't know if there's soup I don't know what kind of soup I don't know if they're Peas or they corn and he's like I never thought of that it was like I opened my cupboard and there was just all tin cans I got a call from Je
nny totally hysterical upset saying that some men came in and took Daniel from his job my dad's first reaction was like oh I don't know my son anymore and I think he was just in shock it's funny growing up it wasn't the political kid that was fighting for anything now he was just a regular kid played with his friends wrote his bike it wasn't like he you know had this whole history but you know you don't know what's inside someone until they get older and they start to think about who they are I
was born in 1974 in Brooklyn I moved to Rockaway when I was around thirty Rockaway Beach in Queens it's like mostly you know working-class people my dad was a cop and a New York police department I went to high school at a place called Christ the King Catholic High School and I was a track runner and you know I got scholarships and stuff like that and then when I got to college I was like oh I guess I will major in business because that's practical when I graduated I got a job at a massive publi
c relations company called burson-marsteller during this time period at some point along the way I ran into a woman collecting signatures at Union Square she kept told me about wetlands the wetlands Environmental Center and that Cana was where a change [Music] it was basically the idea was over the bar that had live shows but the profits would go to running an Environmental Center so went to this meeting and they played these films that blew my mind [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I had never se
en with my own eyes what kind of world we lived in I feel like I'm in perpetual Mourning and I happen from the moment that like I don't know that I kind of took the blinders off and was like holy crap what the hell are we doing [Music] and I got involved pretty much instantly I protested it constantly I did letter writing a lot did letter-writing every weekend at wetlands I wrote hundreds of protest letters to all sorts of different agencies and at the time they announced that there was going to
be a national gathering in Crandon Wisconsin so I went you know I mean I was shot a city kid I I mean I like nature as a concept but I was like never had slept outside before my whole life I was like 22 [Music] it was like different than anything I have ever seen we went swimming in like creeks we were like going out on logs and jumping off we were skinny dippin I mean all this stuff is new you know traditionally at the end of the rendezvous they have a big action when we went to town and had a
protest at the mine office and I actually ended up being arrested and it was really eye-opening you know to to kind of learn about this different world and it's like environmental resistance movement I'm a fourth-generation Oregonian grew up in Eugene my brother works in mill my uncle's own mills it's something that if you're from the northwest is something you do I think I met Daniel here in Eugene they called him the disgruntled one just because he had sort of a snazzy sort of attitude and he
was always sort of bitter and he was always sort of pissed off and he'd always challenged people for other stupid ideas and and so I think you know they sort of coined this nickname for him the disgruntled one I think Daniel arrived out here about 99 1999 but to really understand you know why these arsons were set I think he got to go all the way back to a time when Daniel was still living back east you got to go to about 1995 which was the winner Creek timber sell warner creeks about 50 miles
east of Eugene and it's probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and in 1995 the Forest Service decided to open it up for logging people would up there and created a blockade on a federal logging road to try to prevent you know the logging of this place so we created a documentary called pickaxe which is the story of Warner Creek one we don't think you guys have the right to take a protected forest teeming with life in a bid and log in here for a long time people were fighting th
e Forest Service through like holding signs letter writing some of us from a hippie type approach to protest but there was this new kind of protest that was becoming popular people would call it sabotage or monkey-wrenching they would glue locks and pull up survey stakes they would maybe put sugar and gas tanks of bulldozers i warner creek you know just a simple little blockade turn it into an all-out assault on the only way in for that forest protestors dug a series of trenches to keep logging
trucks who were getting to the forest and then they built the wall it looked like an old fort from the wild wild west and it had a drawbridge and it was really a cool blockade we're joining a line in the sand you can't come in here and destroy this place and they stayed up there for about a year as a federal law enforcement officers my duty inform you that you're in violation you have five minutes to get out of here and you have actually lets them fight enough early one morning the Forest Servic
e came up and arrested the protesters and knocked down the wall that created a lot of bitterness toward the Forest Service and soon after things began to escalate the first time I met Jacob Ferguson was at Warner Creek he was sort of a cool dude you didn't say much he just did a lot of work but I think it's really hard to know Jacob Ferguson unless you're on the end inside of Jacob's life this is the house I moved into you right over here yeah right at that time Jacob Ferguson was living right o
ver there but Jacob was a pirate he was he was definitely an outlaw [Music] [Music] he tried to play a bad-boy image and he did it well because I think he really was one after Warner Creek I think he really felt that the forest service was getting away with stuff I think most of America feels the US Forest Service's job is to protect the forest but the Forest Service is a part of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agriculture he looks upon these forests as crops the US Forest Se
rvice's real job is to provide trees for these timber companies so they can cut these trees for a National Forest they were cutting down these massive old-growth trees up to 750 even a thousand years old and were just massive but I think Jake was tired of the talk he was tired of just you know the philosophize you guys you know me through to through talking [ __ ] now or what let's do it [Music] this investigation was the largest domestic terrorism case in the history of the United States and th
e very first e.l.f action that occurred in the United States occurred at two ranger stations in the District of Orion mainstream legitimate environmental activists were absolutely shocked and disgusted with the fire and they saw the burning of the Oakridge ranger station as a public relations disaster in the months after the ranger station fires there was a split within the environmental movement in Eugene which was quickly becoming a hotbed of activism a growing community of younger environment
alists cheered on the arsons but most environmentalists argued that in a democracy public protest was still a better way of making change in the summer of 97 just a few months after the ranger station fires an event took place in downtown Eugene that for many shook up the debate there was this place downtown it had 40 old heritage trees this beautiful they were gonna put in a parking lot for symantec this big corporation next door and we're gonna cut down the trees to do it activists began mobil
izing to save the trees but as they prepared to take the issue to the next city council meeting the city suddenly announced that it would cut the trees one day before that public hearing on Sunday morning about 2:30 in the morning about 11 people what up into the trees to prevent them from being cut we just went and did it hoping that we could stave off the cutting for one day until that public hearing just for one day so the citizens could could talk to the City Council the next day about savin
g them they came in right away wearing right here and gas masks and stuff like that so bang bang bang on the door and 8:00 in the morning some kid says get out there get out there they're pepper spray them in the trees get your camera you got to get there I mean they're pepper spraying them right now they came up in the fire trucks bucket and they cut my pants leg up to my groin so they could spray my leg the pepper spray cutting you know their pants and pepper spraying them in the ass and peppe
r spraying him in the balls and why they were hanging from the limbs 40 feet up people were on the street looking at this and going what the [ __ ] do you think you're doing and so people were radicalized they were started jumping on the fans are going quit that [ __ ] they're tear gassing the crowd and pepper spraying the crowd it was just crazy frantic scene that day [Music] [Applause] and they used about 12 to 15 cans on slim and he stayed up for I think about six or seven hours man [Music] [
Applause] [Music] and then they rushed me with a bunch of water took me to the hospital and then took me to jail and so for the next you know 35 hours I was soaking in pepper spray my hands were orange for a week and so the argument that you need to work within the system was pretty well dashed by what the cops did on that day Angie and June first was really the day that pissed off a lot of people in this town I remember reading about it it's like oh we have this footage um you know it was reall
y intense and that kind of stuff like that's part of the story that was like part of the backdrop it's crazy it's crazy I think a lot of moments like that really erode people's belief that anything can actually change next week at 4 months and I'm on house arrest my days here really tedious it's just it's really hard to focus and do anything just thinking about my future and how uncertain it is I get really sad at night you know I prefer to sleep straight through so I don't have those moments bu
t I have them almost every night so I've been doing okay though you know All Things Considered I mean I feel like on one level I just have to be really thankful for what I have which is like a good family really good friends so I try to like keep things in perspective hey how are you hey Hayden Daniel was living with his girlfriend when he was arrested and she's moved into his sister's apartment to be with him you know people are all different and some other people they were my position they mig
ht have been totally like questioning everything but I just I think that he feels the dread every single day it definitely removes some of the life from his personality hello hey what's up how are you wait wait wait so wait wait I'm sorry he's cooperating to the full extent six of Daniels co-defendants have appeared in court to accept plea deals in exchange for reduced sentences they've agreed to testify in the government's case against the remaining defendants it hurts that people that I truste
d and cared about you know turn their back on me to be a cooperating witness that's something other people can do I'm just not gonna do it cuz I just have to live with myself and I'm not gonna be that person and start spewing I'll crap just to like get myself out of a situation that's not very pleasant so I'd want him to do whatever he needs to do to not go to prison but I would never want him to compromise his values or beliefs so if he has to choose he'll be facing life in prison [Music] I mad
e the choice to be with him and after he was arrested I made the choice to stay with him I mean that's what you do when you're when you're in a relationship with someone just because something really difficult comes up doesn't mean you just run away you know so I think we should get married [Music] their nose I've seen you with Trinity and you're wonderful with her you're good three showing great chemistry and and congratulate this kid faces 335 years plus life in prison he's getting married I w
ant to kind of grab the positive and think that this is going to work out in the end everything's gonna be okay [Music] you know there's nothing to stress about but there is well if it is my system are you fine i sir she means his name is nina like some recycle type metal it doesn't hurt anything or anybody am i good old diamonds it's easy to discount the environmental movement as a bunch of wackos and hippies and arsonists but it's not like that there are businessman and and you know moms and d
ads and scientists and loggers themselves or people from every walk of life they get involved in this I've spent several years of my life doing logging in the woods I come with a little different perspective then a lot of that you know the the environmental crowd or the you know the the logging crowd I've got a little both in me I'm okay with cutting down trees I just don't have an issue but I not okay to cut them all down the industry tends to call the environmentalists radical the reality is t
hat 95 percent of the standing native forests and the United States have been cut down it's not radical to try and save the last 5% what's radical is logging 95 percent this is radical this is a piece of a of a big old tree this tree probably sprouted just about the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue looks about five hundred years old somewhere in there you know the suckers if they could talk price they have been pretty boring up until about 75 years ago when all hell broke loose out here on th
e ridge and and they started cutting them down most of them are gone now so we won't be seen any of these for at least another 500 years and that's if we leave them alone these are amazing old trees I moved out west in October of 98 I got off to northern California I had never seen trees like that before I had a really profound impact on me I was already quite radicalized but I couldn't believe the fact that people accepted what was going on I have memories of like like for the first time seeing
log trucks you know and be like whoa you saw the mills are you going into the forest and you stumble upon a clear cut like it just blew me away just the arrogance of it I was like man this is butchered you know made me think like why are we being so gentle why are we so gentle in our activism when this is what's happening you know after the ranger station fires Jake Ferguson and members of the fledgling e.l.f set their sights on new targets they came across an Associated Press article about the
rounding up of wild horses from government land the horses were being sent to slaughter houses including the cavil West plant in nearby Redmond Oregon there were so many horses being processed at the plant that horse blood would sometimes overwhelm the town's water treatment facility and shut it down and for ten years people from the area had tried and failed to stop the plant but on July 21st 1997 Jake Ferguson and three others slipped into the facility in the middle of the night and burned it
to the ground the company was never able to rebuild and the arson became a model for the group in one night they had accomplished what years of letter-writing and picketing had never been able to do they expanded and took on new targets they burned timber company headquarters a Bureau of Land Management office and a 12 million dollar ski lodge at Vail Colorado to protest the resort's expansion into national forests an e LF press office was opened by activists who did not know the identities of
the e.l.f members how do I contact you anonymously but I mean what is that like a package drop on your doorstep they publicized the fires and explained the group's actions when a building burns down they have to do a news story about it that's why the Earth Liberation Front burnt down the building in the first place to get exposure we were there to help explain why that building burnt down what it was doing in the first place that was angering people so much a lot of what the Earth Liberation Fr
ont did was considered economic sabotage these corporations exist to make money all of a sudden they're losing money so they have to reassess their activities another thing that happens is that the building that was dumping toxic waste for example into the river one day is unable to dump that waste tomorrow the press office encouraged people to start their own LF cells but mandated that their fires not harm any life take initiative form your own cell and do what needs to be done to protect all l
ife on this planet the idea spread and new anonymous cells popped up in other parts of the country the Earth Liberation Front is turning up the heat again igniting and devastating blazes all across the country a biology lab at the University of Minnesota Bloomington Indiana New York's Long Island now some say a LF is in New England back in Eugene people who celebrated with did that it was people from our neighborhood and there were friends of ours but we were hearing about what was happening we
were celebrating I don't think it was just the Yale app that started ratcheting things uh they think activists all over the Northwest we're also keeping it up a notch they thought there was a possibility of really making things change just have to work a little harder a little more radical [Music] [Music] there was a sort of progression of radicalism that happened in Eugene and so the police we're also having up their presence because we were wrapping up our presence literally we were having two
protests a week you know major protests and so he can imagine what law enforcement won like I was doing undercover work around the Eugene area we were looking for some of these individuals that were causing mayhem around me gene I think it was well known amongst in the movement that they could probe and push and get us to react in a way that oftentimes didn't look very good [Applause] but we were getting rocks and bottles and that kind of thing fire throwing at us you know it just hadn't happen
ed before to say that emotions them don't play into that would be folly I mean that's not true it is personal to take a rock and people's views got hardened and more radicalized from what the police were doing to them within Eugene or other campaigns that were going on around the Northwest are you gonna release when those people are getting attacked and stepped on and pepper sprayed in their face while they were locked down I thought protests and civil disobedience what's the point why bother yo
u know it's not getting us anywhere we're getting victimized by their their police you know oh I don't know I think like I like a lot of people I knew at the time like experienced a massive loss of faith and like that systemic change could happen through you know the system regulating itself or reforming itself straightening when the World Trade summit was planned for Seattle the administration obviously hoped it would be a triumph for Bill Clinton in the closing months of his presidency instead
it's been a nightmare of protests and demonstrations in the streets in 1999 tens of thousands of people converged on Seattle to protest the WTO and its effect on the environment and labor they blockaded the streets using nonviolent civil disobedience the police responded with force to clear the streets [Music] but while the authorities were focused on the demonstrators another group appeared that included current and future members of the e.l.f I met these people in Seattle and I was introduced
to kind of a larger group of individuals here we are in our black clothes you know downtown Seattle it's just full of corporations that are wrecking devastation and destruction on the planet and people were just like okay let's do it these businesses they're not going to bow to people dancing in the street they're not gonna bow to people dresses you know giant sea turtles and so on they care about one thing they care about capital and let me put this in their pocket watch it how we gonna do tha
t how you gonna put a check in that bucket hopefully by causing property damage [Music] I never breathed tear gas pepper spray or saw rubber bullets our concussion grenades until that point I mean it's likely the same I really felt like this is like a war zone like wow holy crap [Music] it felt good to take out my rage on these corporate windows because they had caused so much destruction in my mind it created obviously a huge conversation and dialogue and fight vandalism is vandalism destructio
n is destruction whether it's of lives or property it's not acceptable what do you think of the Boston Tea Party I thought it was wonderful thank you I think people have a great pollyana a viewpoint of social change no real social change that's happened without pressure without force without some would say in intimidating governments and corporations into changing their behavior so we talk about this stuff um I took part in the black bloc at WTO and the goal of the black bloc was to just send a
message an anti-capitalist message that consumer America is destroying the world and destroying the planet and that was the first time we met a lot of other people that ended up being involved in the arsons after the WTO I decided to move to Eugene to keep in touch with some of these people that I met in Seattle and I started becoming a really different person Daniel was very involved in the issues and ideas surrounding the Eugene he was very social he seemed to know everybody and everybody seem
ed to know him including the cops Daniel was kind of known as a leader around the area you know he'd show up at protests or gatherings and you can always see that he was somebody that people looked up to you know you see who's serious and who's not PSM how they're acting what they're saying and so somewhere along the line it became obvious that like I was someone that was interested and doing other stuff I met Jake in the neighborhood there was some allure about him just being quiet and kind of
to himself and being there really set some things in motion [Music] the more radical environmental community have a in my opinion a misconception about this industry and what we do it's it's more than just a job you know I'm a third generation lumbermen my son works in the industry I want him to carry on and and when he has kids I want them to carry on you can't be in the lumber industry without having trees to cut so it's ridiculous for people think we're gonna go out there and cut the last tre
e I think the biggest misconception is that we're out there just knocking the forest down we're just you know we're we're termites we can just rampage through the forest and we leave it a mess and we move on doesn't have an impact certainly nobody likes the looks of a fresh harvest but we really do regrow these trees you know you plant six trees for every tree we harvest that's the law I mean it's just flat-out the law people don't break fly you can't get away with it in Oregon or anyplace else
being an environmentalist is simply respecting the land and the atmosphere around you in that regard I'm an environmentalist Eugene has a commercial railroad and that goes through town you know what's an uncommon to see just like plywood after plywood and company names you know stamped onto it that's definitely how I heard about superior lumber just by seeing their half mile long train full of forests oh by your login Oh bro login just massive trees and out of areas that have previously been pre
tty inaccessible sometimes when you see things you love he destroyed you just want to destroy those things so I felt like the action was justified we were quite surprised that that we have been targeted believe I was invited to participate in superior number by Meyerhoff to be a lookout along with Suzanne but I met Jacob and Kevin right before the action Kevin tugs they got together some weeks before did a surveillance of it it was in an isolated area there was no viable security there they figu
red out where they should place the devices they came back and prepared the devices put him in plastic Tupperware containers made sure that the containers were fingerprint free DNA clean they always were gloves I felt nervous from the gecko for one we were I was staying in this house where everything was stored it was someone else's house I didn't know about the accident on the night of the arson they drove to the staging area they put on their masks they did radio checks they had a police scann
er it's positively nerve-racking I used to get really sick before actions would like throw up and just get like nervous and like just in a zone you know I mean I think you have to get when you're doing something that intense even as a lookout you're just like freaked out because you just don't know how anything's gonna go I was in the back of the van and I was actually kind of by myself in the back of the van so I was just kind of thinking to myself and I think Kevin and Jake we're in the front
of the van and they were just listening to music and so it was fairly relaxed people weren't really talking a whole lot but you know your Adrenaline's going mr. boy and mr. McGowen were the lookouts and they staged north and south of the building I was stationed at a payphone you know everybody else was dressed on all black because everybody wanted to blend in to the to the night however I dressed you know in somewhat darker clothing but I looked fairly normal I just had a scarf that I could wra
p around my face in case somebody passed by it and then I got dropped off kind of inside of the road I might just kind of crawled into this like space it's like shoulder you know and with a bunch of IV mr. Meyerhoff and mr. Ferguson then placed the five gallon fuel containers and activated the timing devices it was done within you know 15 minutes and I got picked up and away we went it was somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. when I was home sound asleep and I got a phone call and of course anyt
ime you get a phone call at 2:00 a.m. in the morning it's not good news [Music] it turned the office in and just fiery oven I mean I don't know how hot it got in here but we had keyboards that were I mean you couldn't tell one key from there they were just melted together I went up to Portland and wrote the communique and sent it in even then it wasn't real it was just like still like kind of this cartoonish thing and I wasn't real until I really saw the newspapers seeing a man from the company
I think Steve Swanson just walking through this like charred remained and it was just like holy crap it was a major blow to to our mental psyche at least in the short run just felt like you know big hole in my heart and Eugene people were jazzed when the big bad boy lay gets you know hit in the stomach and feels a little something and maybe a little fear or whatever that felt good it was exciting the next day I I felt you know like wow I've actually done something where it stopped I didn't have
a problem with what I was doing I thought it was effective it was million dollars or something like that you know it's like when you're involved with it in you're in the thick of it it's hard to look at like all the consequences I'm like the real repercussions of that like you know did this action push them in a better direction did it scare them did it did it help the movement in any capacity on Oak Grove logging there's lots of questions but I don't think at that time I was asking those questi
ons too much yeah yeah yeah yeah totally all right well um that's great I guess I'll see you in a little bit okay bye did you do awesome all right that's great I'm off to system I am off Carthoris technically right now hey I'm off suite seven months in two days with seven months of good behavior Daniels lawyers have convinced the government but he's not a flight risk what do you think about that they want to stay in tonight okay are you kidding me I don't care how tired am i weird we're doing so
mething of course I'm gonna get off house arrest on this day like of all days like it'll be today you know it's really sad for me to like have all these feelings about my home being attacked like my City being attacked I mean when I tell people that like I'll be accused of being a terrorist like whether it's eco or domestic in front of it or if it's just straight terrorists like it's ludicrous to me it's like surreal and and most people that know me are like what no one's accused in my case of f
lying planes bombing things trying to hurt people none of these things that no one's accused of that it's property destruction like that's what it is call what it is you know look naked right how you doing good my freak ass ankle I actually ran a little bit cuz I I wanted to feel like what I was like to run I'm so tired my feet hurt my legs terribly I just had a knee pain was hard ole as time went on the cell members had to become better and better and better at their craft and their craft was d
estruction and so they started what was called the book club they would train one another on how to build incendiary devices and they would go out and test all these things so they knew how long it would take you know at this time of night in this kind of weather how long will it take this thing to ignite what type of fuel would work the best they wouldn't buy all the ingredients from the same store even if the same store had the two or three items that they need they would go to a completely di
fferent store you know 30 40 miles away so it wouldn't ever be tracked it was called the book club because they also you utilize certain codes at the meeting they were told this that the book will be using and then you'd have to use your book that would associate what page number what you know line number what word number and that to how you would decode the message to tell you where to go some of the members of the book club then were more well versed in computer sciences and they brought in PG
P encryption and showed the other members how to do that there was a lot of like having good covers for why you're leaving town why you're not leaving you know where you're going having really good stories that made sense that we're consistent that you told everyone your job your family everything not dressing like activist per se we didn't really look like what you think we would look like I mean if you saw people walking us through you never think that's the F it made a lot of sense of why the
re wasn't any evidence why they weren't caught sooner they were really good at what they did in May of 2001 members of the e.l.f launched an attack against two sites at once a first for the organization the first target was in office at the University of Washington where a scientist was doing genetic research on trees with a grant from the timber industry the second target was the Jefferson poplar tree farm where the group believed that genetically engineered trees were being developed for paper
production in the previous arson Daniel had been a lookout but this time he took a much more active role they ran in a motel room they set up a tent inside the motel room they put on painters suits triple thick gloves they made the devices one team went University of Washington and the other team traveled down to Claxton in Oregon to Jefferson and Papa farms Klotz can has a really small town we're just really trying to avoid a traffic stop because it's just like we're pretty much screwed if we
got stopped just way too many people in the car are dressed in all black the driver of the vehicle was Miss Savoy Miss Acker served as a lookout and then the three men which was mr. Meyerhoff mr. McGowen and mr. block took the fuel loads and the timers to the targets we checked that no one's there I climb around look around no one's in there we've been their previous no one's there the cleaning ladies they're like much earlier we set up all the devices and all the buckets they put little tubs fu
ll of fuel underneath the vehicles and they put soaked rags and they run the rags from vehicle to vehicle the vehicle and the towel just goes and goes and goes and goes and it's tied together and sheets and it's just it's an absolute mess they were careful to take the trucks with the fuel tanks fill the beds of the vehicles with fuel I'm standing there I'm sure interesting gasoline whereabouts have burned thirteen huge SUVs and I was just like what am i doing but we take spray paint myself anoth
er person go out to the shed and I ride ILF on one side and pretty huge letters and the other person writes you cannot control what is wild there's the e know and everything was basically fully engulfed when I got here with all the vehicles and and the fuel tanks and and so forth there was lots of propellant in the area to make things burn and things went too fast and hot [Music] investigators in the Pacific Northwest strongly suspect that two nearly simultaneous fires were acts of ecological te
rror Monday morning May 24th I got back to Eugene and I was just like wow I really need to think about what I just did just seeing you know absolute runes and realizing that like all people were gonna focus on was the fact that things were destroyed and that the issues are being lost and all they care about is the catching the people that did it we're talking about a Jefferson poplar and then they're talking about University of Washington so finding out what eventually happened in University of
Washington the massive destruction to a library not just the professor's office that was involved in the sort of research but the Center for Urban horticulture I was like this is too much too fast too big what am i doing not only had the fire at the University of Washington gotten out of control they also discovered that the Jefferson poplar arson was based on faulty information it turned out that while the previous owners of the property had been involved with genetic engineering the new owners
only had hybrid trees developed using farming methods that have been around for hundreds of years it's hard to really justify it in hindsight nobody would have targeted that facility had we known that there was no genetic engineering going on there at the time so left me with a really bad taste in my mouth like kind of like wow look at this huge intense action and look what happened in Washington and like am I really ready for this like this is super serious and super big we went to the meeting
a few weeks afterwards and I was like this is too much some members of the group were questioning the actions but there were others who felt they hadn't gone far enough some of them decided that they wanted to target basically captains of industry target people now not just property the last circle meeting basically cleaved between people that were seemingly wanted to talk about it not even like planted but they were like we should talk about it and the people that were repulsed by it and reall
y that like ideological divide what ended it that was that was it what people were discussing with my experiences of the arson it may my mind kind of like spin it's things like this that like led me to think like this is futile like there's got to be better ways of addressing what's going on in the world and just burning things down as the e.l.f cell was dissolving the larger activist community in Eugene was splintering as well I think people were self-righteous I think people thought they knew
they had the answer weren't willing to listen to other points of view because their view was more radical in that point of view all those things came into play I think to help narrow the amount of people that were connected within the movement to the point where where is what poof doesn't exist anymore that's one really sad thing about you know about a lot of social movements but you know I think ours especially because we all are so critical of the world and of the way people live in the world
and how they interact with the natural world that we sometimes they're extremely critical on each other and that is definitely part of our downfall as as a movement the scene was really imploding there at the time and uh I took a small trip to New York for my sister's 35th birthday and I hung out with my family and I was like I really love my family I forgot that I like I just grew so disconnected from them and I met Jenny and I was like all right I'm I think I'm gonna move back to New York afte
r moving home Daniel began working at the rainforest Foundation he organized protests against the Republican convention and finally he took a job at a domestic violence organization where he was working when he was arrested the LF fires in the northwest had stopped but the government continued to work on the case we had a war room basically it was a situation room we worked it and worked and worked it we had diagrams all over the walls we had our flow charts and we had our pictures of all our ta
rget suspects up there what's different on TV that's not realistic is that everything's solved in 50 minutes you know and that's know what happens here three years after Daniel moved back to New York the government had still turned up no viable suspects we came together and decided that we will take a cold case approach on one arson to see if we can turn any suspects in that particular arson and the arson we chose was one that occurred in the city of Eugene and it was the joe romania truck cente
r arson wherein was thirty-five suvs were burned to the ground [Music] the new investigation yielded a number of clues which pointed the government toward one local activist the night of Romania Jake Ferguson was accused of stealing a truck which was kind of interesting you know the truck would be needed for something like what occurred we also knew that Josephine oberek was arrested in the olympian area just prior to an arson that occurred up there and we knew that her boyfriend was Jakob Fergu
son and that's when we really turned the heat up with Jake now on their radar they began following him everywhere asking people about him and bringing his friends and for questioning before grand juries you know you start seeing cars following you and cars with guys sitting outside where you're staying you know and it was really scary you know to think that they were kind of on the right track you know and that they're just kind of like right there behind you and he's also the drug user and so t
hat has paranoia they know you know they're coming for me and of course in Jake's case some of it was true where when he did turn around there was war law enforcement following him so lightning was striking all around him and with that in mind we gave him one out we called him into the united states attorney's office we're in a conference room there and then we explained to him quite simply that we knew what a situation was they told him they knew he was a heroin addict and that he lied to an in
vestigator which was a felony and then they bluffed despite a lack of hard evidence they led him to believe that they could tie him to the e.l.f arsons we never told Jake Ferguson Ora's lawyer what we knew or didn't know that's you never do that could we have really put him away for a long time at that point probably not they told him that the arsons carried a life sentence but if he became an informant they'd let him walk away from his crimes I described to him tried to paint an image of him wa
lking through the forest on road some sunny summer afternoon hand-in-hand with the Sun instead of looking at his son through bulletproof glass and he thought about it and at that particular point in time then he and his lawyer excused themselves and left him said well we'll get back to you in a day or so you know he grew up with his dad in prison and he saw how bad that life was he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison and have his son you know never see his dad 20 minutes later I
get a call from downstairs and mr. Ferguson is lawyer want to come and talk to us and so they came up and they said we would like to consider cooperation what do we need to do so that was when we found out that he was willing to cooperate that was one of the best days I've ever had so he started listing off all the things that he had information about and that basically was every arson in the District of Oregon arsons in Washington State arsons in Wyoming arsons in Colorado California we did not
know the scope of what he had knowledge of so that's when the investigation really kind of broke open the team immediately grew from 12 or 13 to 40 to 300 agents after debriefing Jake about the 14 fires he'd been involved in the government had a problem they knew that a heroin addict with a pentagram tattoo on his head would not make a persuasive witness in court and so they needed corroborating evidence we talked to him and his lawyer and we said okay this wouldn't want you to do what you wear
a wire they hit a recording device in the liner of his baseball cap and over the course of a year they flew him all over the country where they arranged for him to accidentally bump into his old friends and get them to reminisce about the old days he walked into a animal-rights conference I was at in Washington Heights at Holyrood Church it was bizarre to see him I mean he was bloated and kind of fat and just looked really different he's talkative which is weird cuz I remembered him it's really
quiet guy he was talkative let's go left we can kick it out of park bench I went to go get a coffee with him and we just talked about yeah what's unfortunate [Music] I'm pretty firmly convinced that if there were ever any hair or fingerprints we already would have hit but I mean it's been long people never got a ride robbed and it'll be fine I mean thinking about it I can't help but be annoyed at myself for being like how did you not know something was really wrong here here's the bill and anyt
hing ever does go wrong it'll be a big if someone decides here when they lose their mind and they want to get money come on Judith feels rather foolish you know I've done that but I'm trying to get over the shame associated with making dumb mistakes Jake was extremely conflicted we'd had to pump him up it was like before a big fight where we sat there with him for probably half an hour to an hour just to get him kind of tuned up and ready to do it it wasn't something I felt good about you know g
etting people to confess by wearing a wire you know but what can you do when you've already taken a deal and then you've admitted to doing all these felonies they've got you know if you do anything to disagree with the deal the deal is off and you've just confessed like you know life in prison so once we had those recordings in place we decided on a particular takedown date the takedown presented an enormous logistical challenge the government believed that the suspects had to be arrested at exa
ctly the same moment or word would get out and they would go into hiding so teams of federal agents fanned out across the country I went to New York and we stayed out on Daniel McGowan's house until I think it was 10:00 or 11:00 making sure that he was gonna be there first thing in the morning and then we got yeah it was not very good sleep the next morning detective Harvey and three federal agents followed Daniel to work I look up and around the corner comes these kind of big boots I just kept
feeling wave after wave of dread and fear just kept you know and I was like I could barely talk I was just like completely like lost my voice like I was just could barely move you know it was really horrible they're like you're being extradited Oregon for you know yo off charges you should consider plea and don't ruin your family like all this stuff we would have them have an attorney we would present the evidence that we have against them and say here's your opportunity to become a cooperator o
r remain a defendant your choice you know wouldn't you when you sit down with them and you show them and let them listen to themselves on tape they see them really sink okay I'm done it was a very successful approach because you know the dominoes began to fall I was in bed my husband was up for work it was 5:00 in the morning he gets up early for work and he came into the bedroom and told me that the FBI and the Oregon State Police were there to talk to me and right away I pretty much knew what
they were there to talk to me about from there it was just you know the hardest decision I've ever made in my life whether or not I should take a plea bargain and cooperate or risk going to prison for the rest of my life and I think that probably will be the hardest decision I've ever made in my life and I chose to to cooperate and take the plea bargain so that I could someday once again you know be with my loved ones I would have been fully prepared to have gone away for five to ten years you k
now it was really looking at dying alone in prison and knowing that every single loved one would have moved on and done something else in their life it felt like a death sentence you know more than a life sentence people can judge me for the decisions I've made but until you've been in that position it's you know it's really hard to know what you would do I never in my life thought I would be cooperating with FBI I always thought that I would be able to stay strong and stay true to my values and
my beliefs and you know I guess sometimes you aren't as strong as you think so um I don't know if you're on but can we talk off camera person Daniels lawyers have negotiated a plea bargain while most of his co-defendants have agreed to testify against each other Daniel and three others have held out four different terms they'll have to take responsibility for the arsons but will not be forced to give information about others if they accept the deal happy birthday everything has this overshadowi
ng this is the last of holidays this is the last birthday party that's less everything it's funny he's not really a big materialistic person but he bought her a lot of gifts this year and we had said I said to him you didn't have to go through his trouble and he said this might be the last time I can you know really ever give her gifts and be here so I don't know he's got some serious decisions to make and they stop no matter what you choose they stop I just feel bad that this came up in this pa
rt of his life hoping for him to make an agreement I was going to trial I think I think with the charges against him that's two life sentences I don't believe in his philosophies but uh he's my son and I and I love him so cool I thanks for everyone for coming and it was [Music] I just wanted everyone to come so I can tell you guys I made my final decision on the plea bargain the government offered a few weeks ago and so I'm gonna be agreeing to this plea bargain and court on the 9th so the recom
mended sentence on the part of the government is 8 years I won't be taken into custody at sentencing I'm gonna qualify for a self-report but it's a major major important thing to them to say that that our crime fit that federal crime of terrorism even though Daniel has now accepted a plea bargain a hurdle still remains a federal judge must determine whether the fires qualify for something called the terrorism enhancement if the judge rules that Daniels fires were terrorism Daniel could be sent t
o a new ultra restrictive prison it was set up after 9/11 to house terrorists in the media and in the courtroom the question is debated eco-terrorism terrorist acts by radical groups eco-terrorists eco-terrorism environmental terrorists people need to question like this buzzword and how it's being used and how it's like just become the new communist has become the new you know it's at the boogeyman it's a boogeyman word it's like whoever really I really disagree with is a terrorist some people h
ave the problem with you know calling this terrorism but when you're basically making the threat where people go home at night wondering if there could be a target that's what terrorism is after the fire for for a long time you really looked over your shoulder and we put all our system in our home and things like that that before we hadn't thought about you know being a New Yorker with experiencing such serious terrorism firsthand it's like how are you gonna call someone who sets fire to an empt
y building a terrorist it's just inappropriate in every way and it's an insult the word terrorism to me is about killing humans it's about ending innocent life and that is the antithesis of what these people did concern for life was a very big part of the plan and implementation of these actions and is why no one was ever harmed or injured in them 1,200 incidents are being accredited to the e.l.f and al F in this country and not a single injury or death those statistics don't happen by accident
terrorist acts under the definition in the law can can vary all over the board there's no requirement for purposes of terrorism that you physically endanger another person's life I mean you don't have to be Bonnie and Clyde to be a bank robber and you don't have to be al Qaeda to be a terrorist I don't think these people are terrorists I think the people and the agencies and the industry at their fighting are the true terrorists when you got big timber companies coming into the Northwest clear-c
ut and old-growth forests big oil companies with their big oil spills that cost billions and billions and billions of dollars you don't see the FBI rating these executives homes or anything like that they are being threatened with life in prison all they really do is just pay a fine and move on to the next quarter the old adage that you know one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter it's true you know if you agree with their motives Wow they're a hero they're not a terrorist at all if
you disagree with their motives and they're a terrorist that's tough okay that's why so whole lot cleaner to deal with crimes crimes non crime okay I'm good with that Arsenal is a crime good I can do that you know is it terrorism well we'll find out you know ordered a book about doing time in federal prison written by a lawyer who did time and I'm very you know getting very prepared for the whole idea but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier No just sucks sometimes it's hard answer just
look at the whole situation you know like what the [ __ ] how this all happened you know the situation with environment it's not getting better it's getting worse and I'm not suggesting that the path of destruction or destroy and everything is the right path but I didn't know what to do it's like when you're screaming at the top of your lungs and like no one hears you like what the hell are you supposed to say you know what are you supposed to do [Music] the judge has sentenced mr. McGowen to 84
months in prison that's seven years the court also imposed the Terrorism enhancement he's been branded as a terrorist in the media he will be listed as a successful government terror prosecution for the rest of his life and we are very disappointed we believe it's legally wrong and factually wrong I look at the trailhead right there oh my god it fell from there the older I get a more circumspect Attica and I know now that a world is not black and white it's not that simple when you when I first
read about these arsons and became involved in the investigation of the arsons you see all the damage and the harm that they've done and the threats they made they're not very likable people at all once you get to know them as a human being you you start looking at their motivations because you're curious about it why did they do such a horrible thing and you look at their background and you look at their childhood and you look at how they've evolved from the days when they committed all these
crimes and then instead of just being a cold mugshot or a piece of paper they become human beings and so you begin to understand them and that's not that you're saying you approve of their conduct or their behavior but you gain an understanding and insight as to how it came to pass that they started doing these things and then you're curious about how their lives will end up but only time will tell my stomach is [Music] no I got it sure I got to be independent you're going to be there to advise
me on stuff I'm in your corner I know thanks pop sir everything I'll see you later [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] take us down and all apart cherry tree lay us out table [Music] you shove all right [Music] is asking to leave it alone [Music] [Music] breathing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
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