A federal jury on Wednesday convicted the four top leaders of the anti-government Montana Freemen of engaging in a gigantic conspiracy against the nation’s banking system.
The jury said it was hopelessly deadlocked on the remaining eight defendants and other counts in the indictment.
LeRoy Schweitzer, Daniel Petersen, Dale Jacobi and Russell Landers were convicted of a conspiracy to defraud four banks in what prosecutors said was a massive assault on the nation’s banking system.
All four had been convicted on several other charges in the indictment last week.
No additional defendants among the 12 anti-government Freemen on trial were convicted in Wednesday’s verdicts. Jury foreman James Coates Jr. gave a firm “no, your honor,” when U.S. District Judge John Coughenour asked if further deliberations were warranted.
The judge declared a mistrial on all counts still unresolved, and gave prosecutors 10 days to decide whether they will retry the six defendants not convicted of any crimes.
U.S. Atty. Sherry Scheel Matteucci said she did not know immediately what the government would decide.
Lead defense lawyer Tony Gallagher said, “The government made a mistake in charging these people in the first place.”
He said he expects the remaining defendants will face new trials, but possibly individually or in smaller groups.
Jury foreman Coates declined to talk to reporters.
The jury had been unable to return any verdicts last week on the conspiracy charge, which was the heart of the prosecution’s case. The Freemen issued 3,432 bogus checks totaling $15.5 billion to followers nationwide.
Schweitzer, the mastermind of the scheme, and Landers also were convicted Wednesday of an additional count, of defrauding Norwest Bank of Butte-Anaconda, which was the main bank that the bogus checks targeted.
About two dozen heavily armed Freemen kept hundreds of FBI agents at bay for 81 days in 1996 around the foreclosed farm property they called Justus Township.
The standoff began after FBI agents arrested Schweitzer and Petersen in a sting operation that lured them from the compound. The FBI hoped that the Freemen, minus their top leaders, would then surrender peacefully. They did, but not for almost three months.
Prosecutors contended the Freemen issued the bogus checks in an attempt to disrupt the nation’s banking system.
Prosecutors portrayed the group as sophisticated con artists who used their fiercely anti-government dogma as a smokescreen behind which to commit fraud.
The Freemen, who reject federal government authority, regularly wrote their own checks to buy goods and services, put their own liens on houses, and devised other means to cheat taxpayers and businesses out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said.
Defense lawyers argued the conspiracy never existed and that the Freemen and their followers genuinely believed their various types of “checks,” based on common-law liens, were valid. They argued their clients also were true believers in the alternative “government” they thought the Freemen had established.
Wednesday’s verdicts came after a five-week trial and six days of jury deliberations.
The jury rendered a partial verdict July 2, convicting a half-dozen Freemen leaders of various federal crimes, including threatening the life of a federal judge.
