Detroit News
June 20, 2006
Some call it Michigan’s own mini-Waco.
Just one week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, FBI and state police sharpshooters took out the two owners of a pro-marijuana, libertarian enterprise known as Rainbow Farm in the southwest corner of the state.
The dead men, Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, had been charged with growing marijuana, running a “public nuisance” with their yearly hemp festivals, and operating a “drug house.” Weapons charges also were filed.
The question that lingers five years later is how in the world a minor-league dope bust managed to go so wrong, and how this stoner utopia, albeit one with connections to the Michigan Militia, passed in just a few months from flawed paradise to nightmare — a small-town tragedy detailed in a new book by Dean Kuipers, “Burning Rainbow Farm.”
At the heart of the story are two men, neither of whom was apparently willing to back down. One was Crosslin, whose belief that the government shouldn’t control what adults put in their own bodies was absolute. He’s now buried in a family vault.
The other was Scott Teter, the Cass County prosecutor in 2001.
Some paint what went on at Rainbow Farm as lawbreaking, pure and simple — and lawbreaking of a morally corruptive sort. But for Crosslin and much of the ragtag community that gathered around the farm, his was a principled stand, an act of civil disobedience aimed at the War on Drugs.
Like the FBI and state police, Teter, who now works in the Michigan attorney general’s office, says he is prohibited from commenting on account of a pending wrongful death suit on behalf of Rohm.
As for the people of the town of Vandalia, opinions still are sharply divided about the outcome.
A tale of two sides
One of the big questions looming is whether putting FBI and Michigan State Police sharpshooters in the woods — as opposed to starving the two men out — was the right step.
“I just don’t think they had to kill Tom and Rollie to get them,” says Sondra Ursery, who was Vandalia’s mayor at the time. “They were just two men.”
Others maintain Crosslin and Rohm got precisely what they wanted, says Dale Williams, who owns Trail’s End Sports in Vandalia.
“The rumor was they committed suicide,” he says, “to draw attention to their cause.”
The FBI has always maintained that the two men raised their guns at federal agents, who had little choice but to shoot to kill.
But Crosslin’s brother, Jimmy, who still lives a couple miles from the farm, insists that even agents on the scene were shocked by what finally went down.
“When my brother got killed,” he says, sitting outside his garage, wearing a baseball cap with a marijuana leaf emblazoned on it, “me and my son went kind of crazy.
“The cops were trying to push us back,” he adds, “but there was one state trooper there who had tears in his eyes. He knew it wasn’t right.”
Author Kuipers, a Kalamazoo native now living in Los Angeles, first heard of the case when the Sept. 9 edition of the Kalamazoo Gazette arrived in his mailbox with Rainbow Farm splayed all over the front page.
What snagged him, he says, was that the case “shows the way that we really use the drug war laws.” Legal tools intended to break drug kingpins — like forfeiture of property — end up, in Kuipers’ view, getting applied to cases like this, “a nuisance complaint,” he says, “that has nothing to do with a violent drug dealer.”
Cannabis capital of Michigan
Jimmy says Crosslin began assembling the property on Pemberton Road that would become Rainbow Farm in 1993. As it evolved, the farm became his life mission.
It was the place where Crosslin and Rohm, who were lovers, could raise the latter’s son, Robert, and create a community of family and friends, many of whom took up jobs at or near the farm.
The idea was to create a farm and campground with services — eventually including a store, head shop, coffee shop, shower facilities and laundromat — where alternative folks of all sorts could party without fear of disapproval or police interference.
Soon enough, Rainbow Farm was the marijuana capital of Michigan. Crosslin, the politicized member of this pair, was a cannabis crusader and a big supporter of the Personal Responsibility Amendment, an initiative to legalize medical and private use that never made it onto the 2000 state ballot.
Those who attended the annual Hemp Aid and Roach Roast festivals — author Kuipers describes them as “part Woodstock, part union picnic” — were routinely confronted, says Jimmy Crosslin, by Rainbow Farm activists urging them to register to vote.
Doddery bands from the 1960s — The Byrds and Big Brother and the Holding Company among them — played Rainbow Farm’s various festivals, belting out tunes while giddy festivalgoers slid down the aptly named “Naked Hippie Slide” on a nearby hillside.
One rule was absolute, however, according to Jimmy and Crosslin’s former manager, Doug Leinbach — nobody connected to the farm sold pot. Period. Crosslin knew that was an express ticket to prison.
In like manner, particularly once Teter began his investigation, hard drugs were actively discouraged. Indeed, a Rainbow Farm flier advertising Hemp Aid 2001 pointedly notes, “Nitrous oxide and other hard drugs suck! So don’t bring them!”
A prosecutor’s mission
It may sound far-fetched that two openly gay guys could run a marijuana campground unmolested in the most conservative corner of the state, but that’s how things rolled along for several years. It changed shortly after Teter was elected Cass County prosecutor in 1996.
The way the story played out from there seems to have hinged on misjudgment leading to escalation on both sides.
In 1999, Crosslin, never a man to hide, began renting billboards to advertise Hemp Aid and Roach Roast.
By all accounts, Teter did his level best to catch Crosslin. But the brass ring — tying the farm to drug sales — always eluded him, Kuipers says, despite the undercover narcs the prosecutor sent to their festivals.
In March 1999, Teter sent Rainbow Farm a letter informing them that he would employ the forfeiture laws that are a key element of the War on Drugs to seize the farm if any hard drugs were ever found.
Crosslin’s reply was enraged and blunt, snapping that his “friends at the Michigan Militia” — who’d helped police the hemp festivals one year — would have ideas on how to handle the prosecutor’s threats.
Crosslin added that he and his family were willing to die “before we allow (the farm) to be stolen from us.”
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings, invoking the Michigan Militia in connection to a criminal enterprise seems a little like waving a red cape in front of any law-enforcement officer.
Teter redoubled his efforts.
In May 2001, he sent in officers looking for signs of tax evasion.
They didn’t find those — but they did find 301 marijuana seedlings in the basement.
The men were arrested and released on bail.
A week later, officials seized Rohm’s 12-year-old son on a school playground and placed him in foster care.
At this point, Crosslin was looking at serious jail time for the marijuana offense, the permanent loss of Rohm’s child and all that the men had worked for the previous eight years.
Says Dori Leo, his attorney in Kalamazoo, “You understand that (in drug cases), they can take away all your property before you’re even convicted. That’s what I think tipped Tom over the edge.”
Fought the law
The endgame came on Aug. 31, 2001, when Rohm and Crosslin were supposed to appear in court.
They never made it. Instead, Kuipers says, they signed wills leaving everything to Rohm’s son and then alerted their immediate neighbors that they might want to vacate for a few days.
The standoff began that Friday.
In camouflage fatigues and carrying Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifles, the men began setting fire to the farm’s outbuildings. At some point early on, according to press reports, somebody shot at a WNDU-TV news helicopter covering the fires, piercing its skin.
Buggy Brown, who worked on a neighboring farm and knew Crosslin and Rohm well, found the area just outside the farm that afternoon swarming with law enforcement.
Though he loved hanging out at the farm, Brown says he’d always had a bad feeling about an eventual run-in with the authorities.
“To tighten the noose around them like that, with (sharpshooters) crawling through the woods, was unnecessary,” he says. “But I also know it was inevitable.”
Crosslin, who was armed at the time, was shot through the forehead Monday afternoon by an FBI sharpshooter, supposedly while retrieving a coffeepot from a neighbor’s house.
A neighbor’s son, Brandon Peoples, who’d sneaked onto the property, was walking right behind him. Fragments of Crosslin’s skull cut the young man’s face.
Kuipers, who has examined the FBI reports, says Peoples never could say whether Crosslin had raised his gun.
Rohm, all alone in the house, agreed in late-night negotiations to surrender at 7 a.m. the next morning. Part of the deal was that he’d get to see his son before being taken away.
But it didn’t work out that way. Around 6 a.m., an upper bedroom in the farmhouse caught fire, and Rohm — always the cheerful, low-key half of this couple — was spotted running from the house, rifle in hand.
Kuipers reports that state police roared up to the house in an armored vehicle resembling a tank, and ordered Rohm to drop his rifle.
Rohm looked scared, according to Kuipers’ account, and ran back into the house, possibly to get the couple’s dog, Thai Stick.
When he ran back out, the police say he took refuge behind a small pine tree and raised his rifle. One bullet fired by a state police sniper went through the butt of Rohm’s rifle and into his chest. Like Crosslin, he never fired a shot.
Says their attorney Leo, “When an animal does something wrong, we use a tranquilizer. When there’s an escalation in human behavior, the criminal-law system moves toward deadly force.
“I’m not sure that’s what America is about,” she says. “And I’m not sure that’s what the American people want.”
If Kuipers had to point at anything that caused the conflict to spiral out of control, it would be the Michigan Militia connection — even though that seems to have been more glancing than substantive. Nonetheless, it formed part of Crosslin’s retort to Teter, and may well have laid the groundwork for all that followed.
Says Kuipers, “That really put the prosecutor and local police on a kind of war footing.”
Whether it was out-of-control rebels or heavy-handed government that created the final conflagration, for Jimmy, it all comes down to wasteful deaths in the end.
“My brother never did harm anybody,” he says. “He just had his festivals and did what he could for the town.”