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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04052016/redux-pickering-vs-usa">http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/04052016/redux-pickering-vs-usa</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<br>
<b><big><big><big>Redux: Pickering vs. the USA</big></big></big></b><br>
by Geoff Kelly / Apr. 6, 2016 6am EST<br>
<br>
On March 18, the Buffalo News ran a fine story by reporter Phil
Fairbanks, the details of which readers of the region’s alternative
press (both The Public and Artvoice) have known for some time. It’s
the story of how the FBI spent two years and as yet unnumbered
resources tracking the activities of the owners and habitués of
Burning Books, a shop on Connecticut Street on Buffalo’s West Side
that specializes in radical history, talks and films about radical
movements, and workshops on such treacherous subjects as Freedom of
Information laws and how the average citizen can apply them.<br>
<br>
Excerpt from FBI files documenting the two-year investigation into
Burning Books and its owners.<br>
<br>
Fairbanks covered the basics: <br>
<br>
In February 2012, a confidential source told agents from the FBI’s
Buffalo office that the shop’s owners—Leslie James Pickering and his
wife, Theresa Baker, along with Nate Buckley, an activist who
garnered headlines in the News when he was pepper-sprayed and
arrested by NFTA police during a rally in front of M&T Bank’s
downtown Buffalo Main Street branch—were inciting violence in
workshops and talks at Burning Books. As a result, the FBI initiated
regular surveillance of the shop and Pickering and Baker’s home on
Fargo.<br>
<br>
At least one more confidential source eventually began to cooperate
with the investigation.<br>
<br>
The FBI’s surveillance included regular drive-bys by agents at both
the shop and the Fargo residence of Pickering, Baker, and their
daughter. It included confidential sources sent by the FBI to attend
events at the shop. It included a “mail cover,” whereby the
addresses on mail coming to and from Pickering and and Baker’s house
were recorded and presumably investigated. It included interviews
with an ex-girlfriend of Pickering, who is a lightning rod for this
kind of scrutiny because in the late 1990s he served as spokesman
for (though he insists he was never a member of) Earth Liberation
Front, a radical environmentalist group that made its name during
that era with a series of dramatic arsons and other actions in the
Pacific Northwest. The surveillance ultimately embraced a “cell” of
nine locals: Pickering, Baker, Buckley, and six others still
unnamed, because only the three shop owners agreed to let their
names go unredacted in the files Pickering and his lawyers received
from the federal government after numerous requests and appeals.<br>
<br>
Pickering and his family were placed on a travel watch list,
resulting in his detainment at airports.<br>
<br>
The FBI dropped the investigation in January 2014, a full year after
one of the confidential sources recanted. The documentation of the
investigation Pickering and his lawyers have received so far also
suggests that the investigation was dropped because it yielded no
activity that warranted keeping it going. <br>
<br>
There are several elements that the News’s article underplayed:<br>
<br>
First, the article notes that the two easily indentifiable
confidential sources were disgruntled tenants in the apartment above
the shop who had an antagonistic relationship with their landlords.
Their names are Amy Upham and Selena K. Lloyd. Upham, who responded
to inquiries by a reporter following this story, has since moved out
of town; the more mercurial Lloyd’s whereabouts are unknown.<br>
<br>
While the article includes Pickering’s suggestion that both sources
struggled with mental illness, it does not pursue that suggestion.
As it turns out, one tenant, Lloyd, likely the initial source, had
been hospitalized for mental illness; the other tenant, Upham, has
written about her struggles with mental illness. Upham has also
described Lloyd as mentally ill, abusive, and potentially dangerous.<br>
<br>
Upham has told mutual friends that her relationship with Lloyd was
fraught with violence and threats of violence, and that she may have
felt compelled to cooperate with her partner’s vendetta against the
shop’s owners in order to keep her partner from more dangerous
reactions to their disagreements with their landlords. (Upham feared
and perhaps suffered violence herself.)<br>
<br>
Indeed, Lloyd allegedly threatened to kill Nate Buckley—a threat
that Buckley duly reported to the Buffalo Police Department, and
which was reported to Buckley after Lloyd was released from ECMC’s
mental health unit, where she apparently reiterated the threat. That
first death threat occurred in November 2001, just three months
before the FBI’s confidential source—most likely Lloyd—came forward
to impugn Pickering and Buckley.<br>
<br>
Finally, the frequency with which the shop and its owners were
surveilled. Pickering and his lawyers, Mike Kuzma and Daire Irwin,
are waiting for new documents to be released by the end of this
month. There are 633 pages so far, but the FBI has suggested many
times that number remain to be vetted before they are released.
After this month, the lawyers have been told, the feds will clamp
down on further releases. But what Pickering and company have seen
and read so far suggest that cars came by more than once a week in
the initial stages of the investigation. Informants were sent to
events at the shop, and Pickering says that those informants could
not have been Upham or Lloyd, as the antagonism between landlords
and tenants would have made their presence notable.<br>
<br>
All this raises three questions:<br>
<ul>
<li>Why would the FBI spend two years on an investigation spurred
by sources who were clearly compromised, both in terms of
objectivity and mental balance? Did they fail to investigate the
credibility of the sources? Or did they simply not care?</li>
<li>What resources were expended on this fruitless investigation?
How many man-hours? What surveillance techniques were brought to
bear, and what did they cost?</li>
<li>Who are the other six in the nine-person “cell”? To what
degree were they investigated or surveilled? Who else, locally
and farther afield, is subject to such scrutiny?</li>
</ul>
On Saturday, April 9, 7-10pm, there will be a fundraiser and talk at
1526 Main Street (at the corner of Ferry), where Pickering and
others will discuss the investigation and display some of the
related documents they’ve retrieved from federal authorities through
Freedom of Information requests. Proceeds will help pay continuing
legal costs.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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