Eco-warriors wage stealth campaign

Elusive band hits 'Earth-rapers'

Fred Kaplan / Boston Globe 16jan01

NEW YORK - They work by night, with stealth, burning construction sites, dumping sand in bulldozers' gasoline tanks, freeing mink from cages and wild horses from corrals, all - as one of their manifestoes puts it - ''to inflict economic sabotage on Earth-rapers.''

They wreak their damage, and release their boastful communiques, in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, and - playing on the group's abbreviation (ELF) - liken themselves to ''the mischievous elves of lore.''

But what is this front and who are these elves?

Remarkably, after eight years of activity - including a rash of fires last month in Mount Sinai on Long Island, N.Y. - nobody knows.

The FBI, federal prosecutors, state and local police departments, even more-peaceful environmentalists have been looking, but their search has not resulted in a single indictment, arrest, or even a suspect from two dozen acts of sabotage over the years, causing nearly $40 million in damage.

''We are practically invisible,'' a 1997 ELF communique read. ''We have no command structure, no spokesperson, no office, just many small groups working separately, seeking vulnerable targets and practicing our craft.'' It tells all readers, ''Find your family! And let's dance as we make ruin of the corporate money system.''

Craig Rosebraugh, 27, an animal rights activist in Portland, Ore., who has served as the group's publicist for the past four years, has said he receives word from ELF members when they take responsibility for some deed. But even he says, ''I never disclose from where or how they come in, because I don't know.''

Last year, the US attorney's office in Oregon confiscated Rosebraugh's computers and documents, and called him to testify before a grand jury, but still came up empty-handed.

''There is no hierarchy, no physical group that they can see,'' Rosebraugh said last year in an interview with Bear Deluxe magazine in Portland. ''You might have a cell operating, or 57 cells operating, where no one knows each other.''

Until recently, these cells confined their activities to a few states in the West and Midwest. Two years ago, someone claiming affiliation with the ELF committed an action in Boston, but it was so out of character - a purely symbolic smearing of red paint on the Mexican Consulate, to protest Mexico's treatment of peasants - that the pranksters probably got the names of their liberation fronts mixed up.

Still, in the past couple of months, the elves have come east. On the night of Dec. 30, they broke into four houses that were being built as part of a huge development on a former pumpkin farm on eastern Long Island, and set them on fire - in protest of suburban sprawl.

They left behind a note: ''If you build it, we will burn it.''

The fire followed similar but lesser acts of destruction in Long Island housing projects on Dec. 1, 9, and 19.

Lennard Axinn, a partner in Island Estates of Mt. Sinai, the development company building the houses set ablaze most recently, said the tools were fairly primitive - bottles filled with gasoline, a sponge placed on top of the bottles, candles placed on top of the sponge, causing an explosion when the candles burned down.

The cost to repair will be about $60,000, Axinn estimates. This is small stuff in the ELF canon.

Their biggest coup took place in October 1998 when they set fire to a ski facility in Colorado, causing $12 million in damage. The motive was to protect what a communique called ''the last, best lynx habitat in the state'' from a ''greedy corporation'' that insisted on ''putting profits ahead of Colorado's wildlife.''

As with all the acts so far, nobody was physically injured.

Other big acts have included burning down a US Forest Service station in Oregon (damage: $5.3 million), a US Agriculture Department animal damage control building in Washington state ($2 million), a meatpacking plant in Oregon ($1 million), and an office at Michigan State University involved in genetic-food research ($400,000).

Just two days ago, the group took responsibility for a Jan. 2 fire in a lumber company's offices in Oregon, causing $400,000 in damage.

The ELF was formed in 1992 in Brighton, England, as a splinter group from Earth First!, after the leaders of that militant environmental organization decided to abandon criminal tactics.

The following year, ELF issued a joint communique of solidarity with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a group that takes equally militant actions to oppose business and scientific research that involves capturing or killing animals.

The main difference between ELF and ALF, Rosebraugh once said, ''is their names. ... The main goal is the same - trying to strike through economic sabotage.''

ELF manifestoes have cited as inspiration the Luddites, who sabotaged factory machinery in 19th-century England. Their ideology also shares much with that of Theodore A. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who, after the 1998 ski-lift arson, wrote to a Denver television reporter: ''I fully approve ... I congratulate the people who carried it out.''

The primary source of ELF's tactics, however, is a 1975 novel by Edward Abbey, called ''The Monkey Wrench Gang.'' Abbey, who died in 1989 at age 62, was a self-described ''desert anarchist'' who often quoted Walt Whitman's dictum, ''Resist much, obey little,'' and deeply resented what he called the ''Californicating'' of the Southwest border states.

''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' was a raucous tale about a motley crew of eco-warriors who burn down billboards, snip barbed-wire fences, pour syrup into gasoline tanks, and ultimately plot to blow up a giant bridge and power dam.

The founders of Earth First! took the novel as its bible. Its first pamphlet was called ''Eco Defense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching.''

Many environmentalists deplore the ELF. A consortium of groups in Wisconsin posted an open letter on the Internet, calling their actions ''cowardly'' and warning them, ''Stay out of Wisconsin.''

Richard Amper, head of the Long Island Pine Barren Society, called ELF's recent arson in his territory ''wrongheaded'' and ''meaningless.''

The houses ELF set on fire are part of a development of 49 single-family houses, each selling for $350,000 to $450,000, spread out on a half-abandoned pumpkin farm.

In one sense, Amper said, the ELF critique of such developments has a point. However, he noted, ''Everybody knows it. You don't have to make Long Islanders aware of the problem.''

In fact, Long Island over the past decade has spent $300 million - more than all but five of the states - to preserve open space from the developers' bulldozers, he said.

Robert Wieboldt, head of the Long Island Builders Institute, said the police think the culprits are local. ''That's the way this group works - local people acting locally,'' he said.

However, even Amper has said he has ''not a clue'' of who they might be, and so the myth of the ''invisible elves'' rages on.

''The Pine Barren Society is considered in-your-face when it comes to government,'' he said. ''But we don't know anybody who's talked about doing anything like this.''