Today I've been doing research, for my book, on so-called "warehouse banks" used by tax protesters, sovereign citizens & other ne'er-do-wells for nearly 40 years as a way of hiding income from the IRS and other prying eyes.
I thought you might be interested in this phenomenon.
I suspect non-ideological warehouse banks of one sort or another may have been in existence longer, but "patriot"-style warehouse banks began to emerge in the 1980s. The most prominent of them was the National Commodity and Barter Association (NCBA), operated by John Grandbouche
and, after JG's death, John Voss. It also had affiliates and spin-offs in other states, like the Mid-States Exchange and the Northwest Community Exchange. The idea behind the NCBA was that it was a "bullion" bank. You would send money to the NCBA and it would convert your $$$
to gold and/or silver bullion, tucked away in a vault. You would be given a secret account number like a Swiss Bank Account. Using that number, you could direct the NCBA to send out money on your behalf--to pay bills or any expense. They would charge a fee. The idea was that
these were not financial transactions--just bartering bullion--and you needn't report any of that to the IRS or anybody else. And the secret nature of the accounts theoretically meant the IRS couldn't find out what you were doing even if it wanted to. Promotional materials
for these entities claimed they were "common law businesses" that were "outside the jurisdiction of government." The IRS disagreed and in 1985 launched a raid on several NCBA-related locations, seizing some 10 tons of silver bullion and around $250,000 in gold bullion. The
main purpose of the raids of the NCBA and various affiliates elsewhere was actually to obtain the account records--to find out who was using these barter banks and audit/prosecute them as needed. A judge later declared the Colorado search warrant invalid, but they never got
It was hard for the IRS to investigate these banks. To investigate one based in Seattle, the Northwest Commodity Exchange, in 1985, they had to send undercover agents and informants to be clients. They posed as an organized crime/illegal gambling operation and said they wanted
to launder money. They sent about $226k through its secret accounts, getting cashier's checks back. None of these transactions were reported to the IRS, as all transactions over $10k must be. For some reason, Oregon seemed to be a popular spot for warehouse banks, and several
such banks were set up there. After many warehouse bank folks were prosecuted in the 80s, you might think the tactic would be abandoned, but you'd be wrong. The 1990s saw more warehouse bank operations investigated, such as the Natural Coin Exchange run by Oregon-based Richard
Flowers, head of the Christian Patriots Association. Warehouse bank operations continued into the 2000s, but by then the "bullion" aspect was dropped as unnecessary. All you really needed was a common bank account. People would send all their money to you and you would
put everybody's money into one single account, commingling it so that nobody but you knew whose money was whose. You kept records with secret account numbers and when one of your clients wanted you to pay a bill, they'd send you instructions and you'd do it.
There have been people convicted at least as recently as 2018 for using bogus warehouse banks. Some of these "banks" were huge. One of them, MYICIS, allegedly had 3,000 clients and about $100 million in deposits over a three-year period. These obviously catered to more people
than just right-wing extremists, but anti-gov't extremists have been regular users, and often operators, of these schemes for years.
Correction: through some glitch one of these tweets ends with "they never got." The phrase should actually read "They never got their bullion back."
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Today I came across someone I had completely forgotten about--the last member of The Order (aka Silent Brotherhood) to be arrested. The Order was a white supremacist terrorist group that operated roughly from 1983-1985, engaging in armored car robberies, bombings, and murders.
The feds eventually took them down, killing their leader in a shootout and arresting a large number of other members on various charges. Many spent/will spend the rest of their lives in prison. The group was defunct by 1985.
One of those arrested was James Arthur Wallington. He
had been hiding out at the Arkansas compound of the white supremacist group called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Unfortunately for him, in April 1985 the feds surrounded that compound, because of illegal deeds being done there, and after a week-long
Ukrainian history is not an area of expertise of mine, but I do have areas of interest/expertise that involve Ukraine: World War II, partisan warfare, the Holocaust, & the Eastern Borderlands region of Europe. So I thought I'd share some of the books I have, for those interested.
I have many books on the Eastern Front in World War II and, obviously, the region of Ukraine figures in many of them. But they're not *about* Ukraine. So I won't include them. But I will mention one book, as it focuses on one of the most important battles that took place there.
This is David Stahel's book Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East. It is the second of a series of revisionist (I mean that in the scholarly sense) books on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It's interesting but it helps to already be familiar w/the battle.
If this is being done intentionally, it is most likely a defensive effort on the part of Ukrainians; most military flooding events are defensive in nature.
This was a tactic that was used extensively in World War II. The Germans, for example, blew up dams over the Roer River to cause flooding to interfere with the American invasion of Germany in 1944-45.
In Italy in 1943, the Germans flooded the Pontine Marshes south of Rome to slow the Allied advance there. The Germans also flooded parts of Normandy in anticipation of a possible Allied invasion and parts of the Netherlands to hinder the Canadian liberation of that country.
If you want to follow the militia trial in Michigan over the plot to kidnap its governor, here are some articles on the opening statements, etc.
Defense attorneys are variously claiming that it was "all talk" and no action, and that it was entrapment.
Of course, two people have already pleaded guilty.
This trial is the federal trial. This case is unusual in that some of the defendants were charged (only) federally and the others were charged (only) by the state of Michigan.
"Whitmer kidnap plotters wanted to help spark second Civil War, feds say"
The other day, trying to answer a reporter's question, I came across someone I hadn't thought of in ages. Today, doing unrelated research in my old Idaho files, I came across my records of him.
Because he's one of the nastiest persons I've encountered, I thought I'd share.
I'm talking about white supremacist Keith Gilbert and his long, awful extremist career. In the 1960s he served time in California for receiving stolen explosives & for assault with a deadly weapon. He later claimed he had gotten dynamite so he could try to kill MLKjr.
By the 1980s he was a follower of Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, living in Post Falls, Idaho.He later formed his own tiny groups, such as the Social Nationalistic Aryan People's Party and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations
Today I thought I'd share another thread-profile on a historical American right-wing extremist. Up this time is Linda Thompson (1953-2009), a key pioneer in the militia movement and an unfortunately significant influence on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Some extremists are active for decades, but Linda Thompson was different, suddenly rising from obscurity to become a national figure, then disappearing from the scene after only a few years. But her timing was unfortunately impeccable.
Thompson grew up in Georgia, served in the U.S. Army from 1974-1978 (allowing herself subsequently to call herself a "Vietnam-era veteran) as a clerk/stenographer, and graduated from law school in Indiana in 1988. She opened a law practice, first in Georgia, then Indiana.