Meet the Anarchists

Clearly, Mokwa didn't walk away from the meeting feeling reassured. The following day he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "We don't expect the same level of violence or intensity .... But we do know that we have some visitors in our city who were involved in the Seattle protests and other protests."

Adds the chief in retrospect: "What we were confronted with, was people of good faith that would say, 'Don't worry about anything, but I can't speak for any of the strangers coming to town.'"

Residents of CAMP believe that the police department's intelligence efforts led them to the St. Louis Independent Media Center's Web site, www.stlimc.org, where a plethora of information detailed the upcoming Biodevastation conference, planned WAF protests and housing arrangements. (CAMP residents maintain the Web site; the collective also comprises the Gateway Green Alliance and Confluence, a local environmental and activist newspaper.)

Mokwa declines to discuss his department's intelligence-gathering methods. In fact, after an initial phone interview, the chief failed to return multiple calls detailing specific follow-up questions. Tellingly, though, Mokwa's meeting with Ramsey and his colleagues was the only WAF-related interaction between the police department and the local protest community -- until the raids on Friday morning.

The Bolozone's a funny house for South City, a two-story wood-frame edifice that sits back from the street and is aesthetically at odds with the brick boxes that surround it.

To get to the front door, you walk through overgrown foliage, up a flight of concrete stairs, and past a garden. At around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, May 16, building inspector John MacEnulty arrived at Bolozone with his police escort.

Dan Green witnessed the scene from the second-floor window of Momozone next door, where he lives. "They pulled up in about three paddy wagons," Green recounts, "five or six cars; a giant, maybe 40-foot-by-15-foot cargo vehicle; a board-up crew."

Police simultaneously appeared at the rear of the building, where a few people were at work outside, painting butterflies on flags to adorn the Flying Rutabegas' two-wheelers. Bolozone resident Kelley Meister recalls greeting the officers, who demanded to enter the house. When she asked if they had a search warrant, she says, they responded that they didn't need one to enter a condemned building. Police cleared the house, handcuffed fifteen people in the front yard, and commenced to search the premises. Then they loaded out their evidence, boarded up the doors, arrested fifteen people on charges of occupying a condemned building and left.

Oddly, Green was not among those arrested. The officers simply didn't see him, he says, and they failed to realize a connection between Bolozone and the house next door.

About a half-hour earlier, nine Flying Rutabegas had been stopped by police as they rode out of Tower Grove Park at Kings-highway. Circus member Tom Shaver, of Santa Cruz, California, says an officer asked to see their bicycle licenses. Confused by the request, Shaver asked whether police often pulled people over to check bike licenses. "He said, 'Yeah, sure. This happens all the time.' They handcuffed us to each other and put us in a van and took us to jail."

The nine circus performers weren't charged with bike-license violations -- that ordinance was rescinded two years ago -- but with impeding the flow of traffic in Tower Grove Park.

Elsewhere in South City, a van full of people was pulled over by police. One of the group, Sara Lantz of Columbia, Missouri, was helping to organize the coming Sunday's protests. She says she and her cohorts were ordered out of the van and vigorously questioned. Lantz was handcuffed and arrested on an outstanding traffic warrant from Columbia. The rest of the group was sent on its way after officers searched the vehicle.

Meanwhile, MacEnulty's caravan headed to CAMP. When the inspector and police arrived, recounts resident Art Friedrich, he was ordered to kneel on the ground and told that if he did not consent to a search of the premises, the building would be boarded up and condemned. According to Friedrich, MacEnulty and the officers went inside. When they came out some time later, he says, some of the officers left to obtain a search warrant.

"The warrant had one blanket statement that said, 'Items of crime for use during protest,'" Friedrich says. "Two cell phone bills, multiple journals, assorted paperwork that I was not allowed to inspect and a CD-ROM drive were all taken."

Lists of missing items drawn up by protestors also claim that police at various locations seized an unspecified number of glow-in-the-dark juggling pins, two black-and- white polka-dot flags, a number of personal journals, cell phones, two computers, a Buckminster Fuller book and an unspecified number of puppets.

MacEnulty also made a stop at the building on Lemp, which is owned by the proprietors of the Off Broadway nightclub next door. What happened next was chronicled in the May 28 installment of René Spencer Saller's Radar Station column in Riverfront Times: According to musicians who use the unoccupied building as a rehearsal space, police and inspectors kicked down the door, telling co-owner Connie Garcia they were searching for squatters. The musicians told Saller that police slashed drum heads and left the place in disarray. (Incongruously, they also allegedly left behind bottles of bleach.) Garcia told Saller she had contacted an attorney but feared retaliation from the city and declined to comment about the incident.