San Diego Union-Tribune
June 18, 2006
In a famous 1928 U.S. Supreme Court dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis articulated what he believed was a cherished constitutional right — “the right to be left alone.”
Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm built a life around that notion, and then died for it. In this frequently illuminating narrative, their deaths play out as a sad mixture of homicide and suicide.
For about seven years, the two men — gay partners — ran Rainbow Farm, a rural hippie paradise in Vandalia, Mich., where thousands of like-minded souls gathered for annual festivals dedicated to both smoking and legalizing pot.
This did not sit well with the local authorities, especially a prosecutor named Scott Teter, who believed he was “guided by the Lord” but also relied on the earthly arsenal available to him as a commander in the War on Drugs.
An escalating battle of wills led Crosslin and Rohm to skip a court hearing and set the farm on fire. A five-day siege ensued, ending only after the two owners, both armed, were shot by law-enforcement snipers.
Their story has echoes of Waco and Ruby Ridge, but it isn’t as well known as those controversial government takedowns. That’s because it happened just a few days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was quickly forgotten.
Not by journalist Dean Kuipers, though. He grew up about 25 miles from Rainbow Farm. Living in California, he still subscribed to the Kalamazoo Gazette, and when he read a front-page story about the shootings he thought something “smelled funny.” He wasn’t talking about marijuana fumes.
He writes, “Here were two gay guys, rich by local standards, real estate mini-magnates, philanthropists, Republicans, pillars of the community even, and they had figured out their only recourse was an armed standoff with police? Over weed? And they weren’t even dealers?”
His book helps make sense of it all. He explains the history of hemp in this country and the changing attitudes about it, and he shows how authorities shamelessly misused drug-forfeiture laws as revenue opportunities.
Through extensive interviews, he brings the dead men back to life, documents how for all their claims about wanting to be left alone, they did a lot to ensure they wouldn’t be. Crosslin, in particular, emerges as a complicated, conflicted figure — a guy who relished bar fights but also went out of his way to buy Christmas gifts for poor kids.
Kuipers is sympathetic, but he doesn’t make them out to be heroes. He could have used some of that same restraint with the other side; Teter comes across as a by-the-books Nazi. The book never really gets at why he considered the farm such a threat.
The author also overreaches in searching for meaning. Some of the quotes used as chapter lead-ins are pretentious. His writing gets stronger as the book progresses, though, and he offers telling insights into human nature: “It’s a mark of a well-loved man that, when he’s up on the ledge, scores of people turn up who think they can talk him down.”
He’s writing there about Crosslin, who couldn’t be talked down and wound up in a place where he felt like it was jump or be pushed. Either way, it was a tragic and — as this book shows — utterly avoidable fall.