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Native American Indian News Headlines Insert Page
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Arrest in 1981 tribal murders revives old mystery |
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Filmmaker completes Northwest Passage transit |
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Native Americans meet in Minn. on climate change |
villages/native/ AP Daily_News Headlines.asp
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 Native
American Village News
By The Associated Press
Arrest in 1981 tribal murders revives old mystery
By AMY TAXIN and GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press Writers
INDIO, Calif. (AP) - In the days
before Fred Alvarez was shot execution-style with two friends on his
verandah, the strapping Cabazon tribal leader feared he was a marked
man: His motorcycle had been tampered with, his mailbox shot up and his
house ransacked.
He visited the local newspaper
several times to say that he'd uncovered something big enough to get him
killed. He arranged to talk with a lawyer to divulge what he knew, but
never made the meeting.
On that day, tribal member Joe
Benitez swung by Alvarez's stucco house tucked among tamarisk trees in
the wind-swept sand dunes of rural Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles
southeast of Los Angeles. There, he found the bloated bodies of Alvarez
and his friends Patricia Castro and Ralph Boger, all fatally shot.
Dried puddles of blood stained the
sand near mattresses they had dragged outside to escape the sweltering
desert heat. The three had been sitting in a semicircle. Police
estimated they had been dead two days.
But why was Alvarez killed? That's
what police and loved ones wanted to know in the summer of 1981, when
the killings happened.
Now, 28 years later, the arrest of a
murder suspect has revived the question, which lengthy investigations
and a grand jury probe failed to answer.
Some believe the former college
football lineman with tattoos, long black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache
discovered money-skimming by outsiders helping the tiny Cabazon Band of
Mission Indians manage its fledgling casino.
Others believe something hinted at by
documents over years: Alvarez had stumbled onto plans for a top-secret
weapons deal.
"When a guy comes in off the streets
and says, 'Somebody's going to kill me,' you think he's out of his mind.
But he was right,'' said Jim Lycett, an editor at the now-defunct Indio
Daily News who met with Alvarez before his death. "Obviously, it's
because he knew something that was going to get somebody in a whole lot
of trouble.''
Authorities are saying little about
their suspect, Jimmy Hughes, a 52-year-old former tribal security
official-turned-preacher.
Hughes was arrested in September in
Miami as he sat on a Honduras-bound plane. He faces three counts of
murder and a count of conspiracy for allegedly killing Alvarez to
prevent him from exposing illegal reservation activities.
Hughes, who is fighting extradition,
declined interview requests.
"More than anything we really wanted
it to be over and to have peace,'' said Linda Alvarez, Alvarez's sister.
"All these years, everything I've been saying, maybe now they'll believe
me.''
___
The Cabazons are a small tribe, just
25 members at the time of the murders. A tribal history commissioned in
1995 recalls the band as eager to drum up business --- at first, talking
about agricultural projects but eventually opening a smoke shop and
later a casino.
The history also recalls Alvarez's
killing. It describes him as a renegade involved in criminal activity
and denies the tribe had any involvement in his murder _ which a state
policeman told Lycett bore the signs of an "obvious professional hit.''
Almost before the bodies were in the
ground, rumors began to fly, backed up by Alvarez's premonitions.
Some said the tribal leader was
determined to expose a scheme by outsiders to cheat the tiny tribe out
of gambling profits.
But some relatives of the victims
wondered whether Alvarez might have also discovered a secret partnership
between the Cabazon tribe and private security firm Wackenhut Corp.
Witnesses and court documents
alternately describe the deal as everything from providing security
services to building a munitions arsenal to selling weapons to the
Nicaraguan Contras, a U.S.-backed rebel group. The tribal history also
details various attempts to start weapons production.
Current officials at Wackenhut
Services Inc. declined comment, and tribal officials did not respond to
interview requests.
Rachel Begley, whose father Ralph
Boger died with Alvarez, has spent years researching the case. Begley
recorded Hughes on a hidden camera at a 2008 religious conference as he
said that Alvarez died in a "mafia hit'' that was "a lot bigger than the
murder of this guy or that guy.''
Begley, who believes Alvarez was onto
some kind of Wackenhut deal, has worked closely with the main sheriff's
detective assigned to the case.
Court documents and interviews
suggest outsiders were aggressively pushing the Cabazons beyond gaming.
Primary among them was John Philip
Nichols, a business consultant hired by the tribe to help it open its
casino. Nichols, who died in 2001, is now listed as a co-conspirator in
the triple murder.
One of Nichols' sons married into the
tribe and soon non-Indians were everywhere talking big money, said Linda
Alvarez.
"There was just all kinds of
(non-Indian) people wandering in and out, coming into meetings and we
had no idea who they were,'' she said. "We felt fearful. I got the heck
out of there.''
Riverside County sheriff's Detective
John Powers, the lead homicide investigator, said he has no proof
Alvarez was aware of a deal with Wackenhut. But he said Alvarez wanted
to oust Nichols from the reservation over concerns about money-skimming
at the casino - which could have thwarted Nichols' plans for business
deals on the reservation, including with Wackenhut.
"What Fred was doing was trying to
get rid of the Nichols family out of Cabazon,'' Powers said. "That is
what got him killed because there was literally millions of dollars at
stake.''
Authorities probing Alvarez's death
recently took a large cardboard box of Wackenhut-related documents and
tape recordings from Peter Zokosky, the former president of a nearby
munitions manufacturing plant.
"With all the documents and memos I
have seen go back and forth, it looks like they wanted to do these
things,'' Powers said. "It just never happened.''
Zokosky, who had government security
clearance and whose wife was Indio's mayor, said Wackenhut had asked him
to write a proposal to build an arsenal and manufacture tank ammunition
on tribal land. But the classified project went nowhere.
"It was submitted. I didn't hear
anything more about it, and Wackenhut withdrew,'' said Zokosky, now 83.
"I think they were dissatisfied with the structure of the Indian
organization.''
The Florida-based company did sign a
joint venture with the tribe to win government security contracts - but
the partnership fizzled when it failed to get bids, said former
Wackenhut spokesman Patrick Cannan. He said to his knowledge the deal
did not involve weapons.
Yet two men said in separate legal
filings the Cabazon-Wackenhut partnership was forged to sell weapons to
the Contras. The idea was to develop night vision goggles, machine guns
and biological and chemical weapons to support foreign entities,
including the Contras, according to an affidavit filed in an unrelated
case by a man named Michael Riconosciuto, who said he worked on the
deal. He is now in federal prison on drug charges.
People claiming CIA ties wanted the
venture to develop machine guns at a "top secret'' tribal facility for
distribution to Nicaragua, said a second man, weapons manufacturer
Robert Booth Nichols (no relation to John Philip Nichols). In civil
court filings, he said he pulled out because Wackenhut didn't provide
State Department approval.
___
Before he died, Alvarez told the
Indio Daily News five times that John Philip Nichols and other outsiders
were cheating the tribal members.
"He said, 'I'm living in a hovel
while all these guys are getting rich off the casino,''' recalled Paul
Zalis, a reporter who worked on the story.
Alvarez felt he was paying a price
for questioning the tribe's direction. He told his family and Zalis that
his house had been ransacked, his mailbox shot and his motorcycle
tampered with. The day after he first spoke to the newspaper, he was
voted out of tribal office.
"He said, 'I just know too much, and
they're going to kill me,''' editor Lycett recalled. "He said it
twice.''
Alvarez also contacted attorney
Stephen Rios and arranged a meeting, saying he had evidence to support
his claims. Rios recalls waiting for hours in his office and growing
impatient--until Benitez called and told him, "Fred's dead.''
After the murders, Zalis said he
began trying to piece together Alvarez's allegations, but was never able
to find proof for a "rat's nest of references.'' The paper ultimately
decided not to publish Zalis' investigative story.
Authorities probed the murders but no
arrests were made.
Three years later, the story of the
killings resurfaced when Jimmy Hughes approached law enforcement and
claimed he had been asked in the presence of Nichols, the tribal
administrator, to deliver $25,000 to a hitman to kill Alvarez.
That claim prompted reexamination of
the murders, including probes by the Riverside County grand jury and the
state attorney general.
In 1985, Nichols was charged in a
separate murder-for-hire plot that was foiled by police informants, for
which he served 11/2 years.
Authorities were unable to connect
that plot to Alvarez's death and the case went cold for two decades,
Powers said. This time, investigators are confident -- and hint there
could be more arrests.
"If it was the story Jimmy gave back
in 1985, we wouldn't be charging him with murder,'' Powers said. "It is
much more than what he said.''
___
Associated Press Writer Jennifer Kay
contributed to this report from Miami.
Filmmaker completes Northwest Passage transit
By SCOTT BOWLEN
Ketchikan Daily News
KETCHIKAN, Alaska (AP) - The creak
and groan of moving sea ice reverberated through the fiberglass hull of
Sprague Theobald's 57-foot Nordhavn power boat Bagan in mid-August as it
sat somewhere in the Northwest Passage, high above the Arctic Circle.
Theobald, an Emmy-winning documentary
filmmaker, knew something about sea ice.
Part of his pre-voyage research had
focused on the early explorers whose ships got trapped in ice as they
searched for an open-water link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
above the oft-frozen top of North America.
And he knew Bagan would encounter ice
during the planned 8,500-mile traverse of the Northwest Passage trip
that began June 16 in Newport, R.I., and would conclude in Washington
state.
What he wasn't prepared for was the
nerve-racking noise produced by huge sheets of shifting, colliding sea
ice.
"The sound was horrific,'' Theobald
said Oct. 26 while talking with the Daily News aboard the Bagan at
Ketchikan's Bar Harbor.
"I thought it was the hull -- it's
that grinding, cracking noise (like) you'd think fiberglass would sound
like if it was breaking,'' he said.
Crew members headed below decks to
check the Bagan's hull ribbing and lay-up.
No damage.
"It finally dawned on me, this is the
ice that's making all that noise,'' Theobald said.
But now the ice had Bagan in its
grip, and both ice and boat were moving toward a rock-strewn shore.
"It looked like the only outcome of
this was going to be very ugly,'' he said.
Two years earlier, Theobald had begun
planning for a transit of the Northwest Passage.
That year, 2007, was the first year
since at least 1978 that late-summer reductions in sea ice had rendered
the Northwest Passage completely navigable, according to the European
Space Agency.
The situation sparked interest among
commercial shippers about the possibility of sending cargo through the
Northwest Passage, shaving thousands of miles from the sea trade routes
between Asia and Europe.
Indeed, it was the potential for
reducing sailing time (and cost) that helped prompt the early explorers
to search for a northern route. The ever-present ice proved an almost
insurmountable barrier, however, and it wasn't until 1906 that Norwegian
explorer Roald Amundson became the first to navigate the Northwest
Passage.
The fact that the Northwest Passage
was navigable again also caught the attention of Theobald, who has
combined his love of oceangoing adventure with a career in writing,
television and filmmaking.
He said about 50 percent of his
interest in the Northwest Passage was for the adventure.
"But 50--maybe just a little more
than 50 percent --was if I could get a good documentary out of it,'' he
said.
Given that climate change has caused
large amounts of Arctic ice to melt, some people assumed Theobald wanted
to do a documentary about global warning from a particular viewpoint.
"Not really,'' he said. "The media
talks so much about global warming, but nobody's really sent a camera up
there to talk to the people who it would affect _ regardless of whether
you believe in it or not.''
Also, filming the Northwest Passage
now would give people an idea of "what we would have to lose'' if
shipping were to be routed through the Northwest Passage, he said.
"Just let the pictures speak for
themselves, but not to try to have an opinion either way on it,''
Theobald said.
He began preparing his boat in
mid-2008.
Nordavn makes "remarkably strong''
offshore trawlers, said Theobald.
"I had this boat for about three or
four years and it dawned on me that with the right combination --
hopefully with some backing and some funding and a good crew--it would
be something I could take on,'' Theobald said.
He went through every system on the
vessel, upgrading communications and heating gear in particular, and
replacing anything else that looked even slightly suspicious.
He lined up full funding for the trip
through various sponsors, including major underwriting from Nordhavn.
But then, after Theobald had
committed to hiring crew (including Capt. Clinton Bolton and First Mate
Dominique Tanton -- Theobald's stepdaughter), the national economic
crisis hit.
He lost a huge chunk of sponsor
funding, including Nordhavn. Thoebald said he continues to have a "great
relationship'' with the boat manufacturer and understands why the
company had to pull its funding for the voyage.
"With the economy, orders were
dropping out (of Nordhavn's) books, left, right and center,'' said
Thoebald.
The sudden absence of funding forced
a huge decision. Should he sail? Or should he call the whole thing off?
"At some point in your life -- once
-- you have to roll the dice in a big way,'' he said.
Theobald rolled the dice, committing
the profits he'd earned from the sale of a house to the venture.
"I said, 'I've got to use that,' said
Theobald.
The Bagan left Newport, R. I., on
June 16 with Theobald, Bolton, Tanton and Ted Croy aboard.
Joining the crew later were
Theobald's son, Sefton Theobald; master diver Greg Deascentis; and
cameraman Ulli Bonnekamp (Croy and Bonnekamp were aboard early in the
trip, but not in the Northwest Passage itself).
Bagan headed north to Newfoundland
and on to Greenland's Disko Bay before cutting across Baffin Bay to
Lancaster Sound.
There, the Bagan entered the
1,800-mile Northwest Passage on July 31, and the crew started work on
photography and filming.
For most areas of the world nowadays,
nautical charts are filled with scores of numbers indicating depths, and
most hazards are clearly marked.
That's not the case for much of the
Northwest Passage.
"Blank, except for one little line
that was done in 1850,'' Theobald said.
Lack of chart soundings made Theobald
think better of visiting an island where an ill-fated expedition is
believed to have become icebound in the 1840s.
If Bagan got into trouble, "it's not
like there's a sea tow or somebody around to come and get you,''
Theobald said. "You were on your own.''
As they traveled through Canada's
Arctic Archipelago, the Bagan crew was downloading the Canadian Ice
Service's daily maps that rate the varying thickness of sea ice in the
region, trying to discern where and how fast the ice was melting.
Based on a lead in the ice on an Ice
Service map, they headed toward a small Inuit community called Gjoa
Haven on King William Island.
On Aug. 15, Theobald blogged that the
crew hoped they were just two days out of Gjoa Haven.
The ice intervened.
Bagan's progress was reduced to a
crawl, its crew looking for any leads in the surrounding ice through
which the boat could proceed.
"We really had to ask the unthinkable
of the boat, and turn her into a tug and a battering ram,'' Theobald
said.
A crew member would sit high on the
boat's radar arch, calling out directions for promising leads. Other
crew would stand on the bow and stern with boat hooks, pushing ice away
"Making our way through this solid
ice barrier was beyond nerve-racking in that the protestations from the
ice were heard in the forms of shrieks, screeches, explosions and deep
powerful shudders,'' Theobald wrote in the trip's blog. "If any of the
ice bits found their way to our exposed stabilizers, propeller or rudder
the potential damage could have bordered on the unthinkable. Time and
again we'd fight for 500 yards, only to have it taken from us at the
last minute, finding that the lead ahead had closed in the 10 minutes
we'd been trying to get to it.''
They'd traveled only 18 miles in 17
hours. And they were now trapped.
"Not being able to move forward or
backward, we shut down the engine and anchored onto a floe, one and a
half miles from shore,'' he wrote.
The next morning found them just
one-half-mile from shore and moving slowly closer.
They received an e-mail from a boat
that was icebound, about 60 miles away. The Canadian Coast Guard had
sent an icebreaker to free the other boat from the ice's grip.
"That really wasn't going to be an
option for us,'' Theobald said. "Because we got ourselves into that mess
and I didn't want to ask Canada to spend a lot of money to get us out.''
They decided to try to push their way
out. But they made three miles before anchoring again on an ice floe.
"It was rough,'' he said. "We were
all pretty beat and exhausted at the end of it _ especially with no
guaranteed outcome. It's not like, 'Well, if we fight through this, the
guidebooks say you reach the end of the ice and you're free.'''
The next morning revealed that they
had drifted seven miles in the right direction.
"By three that afternoon we had
broken our way clear into thinner and less dense ice packs,'' wrote
Theobald, who was impressed with Nordhavn's toughness.
"Some of the hits we took on the ice,
there was no creaking and groaning from the boat. The ice hit and sort
of bounced off,'' he said.
They reached Gjoa Haven at 2:30 a.m.
the next day.
"Never have I been so glad to hear
the engine shut down,'' he wrote.
After a pleasant visit in Gjoa Haven,
the Bagan transited Mclintock Bay en route to a community at Cambridge
Bay.
It was there that Theobald heard some
of the disparate views regarding climate change in the Arctic.
Theobald first interviewed two
elders, men who had hunted in that area for their entire lives.
"The winters are getting longer,''
one of them said. "And the expression that we have is, 'The sun is
coming up at the wrong time of the year. It's coming up too late.'''
Theobald then interviewed some
geologists who had been working there for a decade or more.
"They said, 'Oh, we've seen big
changes, the winters are much shorter,''' Theobald said.
Even at "ground zero,'' he said,
"there are no agreeing opinions on global warming.''
Yet everyone they spoke with agreed
that the Northwest Passage would never open to commercial shipping, he
said.
Cost is the major factor. Ships would
have to have double or triple hulls, and the ice is so pervasive that
icebreakers still would be required, he said.
"It would be so expensive to have a
fleet of icebreakers to go through ahead of you to open a lane that will
shut 12 hours later,'' Theobald said. "It's just such a strong entity,
the ice.''
From Cambridge Bay, the Bagan
continued west through the Coronation and Amundsen gulfs before exiting
the Northwest Passage at 130 degrees west longitude.
The crew celebrated, but they knew
there was still about 2,000 miles to go through some famously nasty
waters, including the Chukchi and Bering seas.
"I thought, 'God, I wish this crew
hadn't watched The Deadliest Catch,''' he said. "Especially me, because
we're all looking over our shoulders (in the Bering Sea) thinking when
is this (bad weather) going to hit?''
They got lucky with great weather in
the Bering Sea, but they got slammed when they came through the
Aleutians and into the Gulf of Alaska.
"It really, really piped up,''
Theobald said. "We had our hands full until we got to Sitka.''
Capt. Bolton had departed the crew at
Nome. DeAscentis stayed on through Sitka.
Bagan departed Sitka en route to
Ketchikan in early October, with just Theobald and his three family
members aboard.
But the ice wasn't done with Bagan
quite yet.
The boat was entering Wrangell
Narrows when a small berg of glacier ice appeared out of the fog.
"It was ... maybe about the size of a
freezer trunk,'' he said. "And I saw it and I was just, 'AAHHH. NOOO! No
more ice!'''
Bagan cleared the berg and arrived
safely in Ketchikan on Oct. 9.
It continued south toward Seattle on
Oct. 27, traveling slowly to try (somewhat unsuccessfully) to coincide
the rest of the voyage with pockets of good weather.
While still in Ketchikan, Theobald
wasn't certain about when the documentary resulting from the voyage
would be finished, or how it would be distributed.
"If I'm doing it on my own, which I
kind of am leaning towards, it will probably be finished by the end of
the summer, so I would be hoping to sell it for the fall, or the next
spring,'' he said.
When he spoke with the Daily News,
Theobald had had some time to reflect on the Bagan's voyage through the
Northwest Passage.
He said the experience really opened
his eyes about the toughness of the 19th century sailors who explored
the Northwest Passage area, some of whom got stuck there in the ice.
"That sailing breed then was a
different breed,'' Theobald said. "But we had GPS, electronic charts,
(satellite) phones, e-mail, could download weather reports -- and when
we were locked in the ice, there was a huge amount of terror involved.
"Those guys, who were stuck up there
for two years with nothing, I mean, they were supermen in that regard.
They would come back, and if not do it again, they would go off to do
(Cape) Horn or something,'' he said.
So what about Theobald; would he do
it again?
Well, maybe as a crewman aboard
someone else's boat, he said.
"You know, I loved every minute of
it, but not to be repeated,'' said Theobald. "I would never take my boat
above Glacier Bay again. I'm a little filled up with ice at this point
-- but I'm not regretting a single minute of it.''
___
Information from: Ketchikan Daily
News,
http://www.ketchikandailynews.com
Native Americans meet in Minn. on climate change
By The Associated Press
PRIOR LAKE, Minn. (AP) - Native
American groups gather in Prior Lake, Minn., on Wednesday to strengthen
their clout in global climate change talks.
The Native Peoples Native Homelands
conference aims to give indigenous people more say ahead of a 192-nation
conference on climate change in Copenhagen next month.
The conference will look at the
effect of climate change on Native American communities, touching on
subjects including subsistence economies, traditional plants and sacred
sites. Organizers say global warming has a disproportionate effect on
Indian communities because of their relationship to the land.
Sponsors include the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, 36 tribal colleges and Native
American environmental groups. The conference runs through Saturday at
Mystic Lake Casino Hotel.
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