Meet the Anarchists

None of this activity, of course, escaped the notice of Police Chief Joe Mokwa. Although he didn't know quite what to expect that May weekend, Mokwa had received reports from other law-enforcement agencies that indicated St. Louis may be a powder keg. "There was a lot of chatter on [protest] Web sites about coming to St. Louis," says Mokwa. "And that's really what provoked our interest." Mokwa's World Agricultural Forum team, headed by Deputy Chief Everett Page, conferred with a St. Louis-based private firm called Allied Intelligence, which had been hired by WAF officials to provide security during the Union Station meetings. (Page recently announced his resignation, effective July 8, rather than face disciplinary action on sexual harassment charges unrelated to the raids.)

The department also consulted with Seattle police officers -- who'd been in the eye of the storm of the protests that accompanied the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings there -- and they studied videotapes of police clashing with protestors in other cities, tapes that showed officers in riot situations, and violent protestors attacking police dogs and horses.

On May 13 Mokwa met with several local activists who had requested an audience to air grievances about alleged police misconduct in an incident following an antiwar protest in Forest Park in March. Seven people were arrested in the fray, and protestors claimed police used unnecessary force. According to activist Bill Ramsey, who heads the Human Rights Action League and the St. Louis Instead of War Coalition, the conversation soon turned to the upcoming anti-WAF protests. "I guess they assumed that we were somehow responsible for it," says Ramsey. "We immediately said, 'First of all, we don't have any responsibility for what is happening next Sunday.' And we said, 'There are other people responsible for that. You need to talk with them.'"

Clearly, Mokwa didn't walk away from the meeting feeling reassured. The following day he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "We don't expect the same level of violence or intensity .... But we do know that we have some visitors in our city who were involved in the Seattle protests and other protests."

Adds the chief in retrospect: "What we were confronted with, was people of good faith that would say, 'Don't worry about anything, but I can't speak for any of the strangers coming to town.'"

Residents of CAMP believe that the police department's intelligence efforts led them to the St. Louis Independent Media Center's Web site, www.stlimc.org, where a plethora of information detailed the upcoming Biodevastation conference, planned WAF protests and housing arrangements. (CAMP residents maintain the Web site; the collective also comprises the Gateway Green Alliance and Confluence, a local environmental and activist newspaper.)

Mokwa declines to discuss his department's intelligence-gathering methods. In fact, after an initial phone interview, the chief failed to return multiple calls detailing specific follow-up questions. Tellingly, though, Mokwa's meeting with Ramsey and his colleagues was the only WAF-related interaction between the police department and the local protest community -- until the raids on Friday morning.

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The Bolozone's a funny house for South City, a two-story wood-frame edifice that sits back from the street and is aesthetically at odds with the brick boxes that surround it.

To get to the front door, you walk through overgrown foliage, up a flight of concrete stairs, and past a garden. At around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, May 16, building inspector John MacEnulty arrived at Bolozone with his police escort.

Dan Green witnessed the scene from the second-floor window of Momozone next door, where he lives. "They pulled up in about three paddy wagons," Green recounts, "five or six cars; a giant, maybe 40-foot-by-15-foot cargo vehicle; a board-up crew."

Police simultaneously appeared at the rear of the building, where a few people were at work outside, painting butterflies on flags to adorn the Flying Rutabegas' two-wheelers. Bolozone resident Kelley Meister recalls greeting the officers, who demanded to enter the house. When she asked if they had a search warrant, she says, they responded that they didn't need one to enter a condemned building. Police cleared the house, handcuffed fifteen people in the front yard, and commenced to search the premises. Then they loaded out their evidence, boarded up the doors, arrested fifteen people on charges of occupying a condemned building and left.

Oddly, Green was not among those arrested. The officers simply didn't see him, he says, and they failed to realize a connection between Bolozone and the house next door.

About a half-hour earlier, nine Flying Rutabegas had been stopped by police as they rode out of Tower Grove Park at Kings-highway. Circus member Tom Shaver, of Santa Cruz, California, says an officer asked to see their bicycle licenses. Confused by the request, Shaver asked whether police often pulled people over to check bike licenses. "He said, 'Yeah, sure. This happens all the time.' They handcuffed us to each other and put us in a van and took us to jail."