Letter From Austin
The Unusual Suspects
Did Austin anarchists torch the Governor’s Mansion?
Guerrillas in our midst? The arson fire scorched everything from the mansion’s porch to its grand staircase.
Texas’s biggest whodunit began in the early-morning hours of Sunday, June 8, in downtown Austin, when several passersby noticed that the porch of the Governor’s Mansion was in flames. “The entire front of the mansion is on fire!” cried one woman in a panicked call to a 911 dispatcher. “It’s huge! It’s a huge fire!” When firefighters arrived, just before 2 a.m., flames were sweeping through the first and second stories and into the attic of the 152-year-old Greek Revival—style building, and soon the entire 8,920-square-foot structure—which had been home to forty governors, among them Sam Houston and the forty-third president—was ablaze. (Luckily the mansion, which had been undergoing a $10 million renovation that was to have included the installation of a sprinkler system, was uninhabited at the time; the governor and his family were living temporarily in West Austin.) More than one hundred firefighters fought the blaze, which took nearly five hours to contain, as smoke drifted through downtown. By dawn, the mansion’s graceful white Ionic columns were scorched and blackened, and the charred roof, which had buckled, appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Governor Rick Perry’s spokesperson, Robert Black, called the damage “extraordinary, bordering on catastrophic.”
Later that day, as the fire smoldered, state fire marshal Paul Maldonado made an unsettling declaration: The mansion had been the target of arson. To the embarrassment of the Department of Public Safety, only one state trooper had been guarding the building when it was torched, and just thirteen of the twenty security cameras on the mansion grounds had been operating that night. But a surveillance camera had captured the image of a man throwing a Molotov cocktail at 1:27 a.m. He appeared to be white and in his twenties, Maldonado would later tell reporters at a June 16 press conference. He was approximately five feet nine to six feet one and, Maldonado pointed out, physically fit, since he had managed to scale a barrier on the grounds and throw a Molotov cocktail “with enough force to cause it to create a fireball.” In other words, he looked like a lot of guys in town. The suspect had even been wearing Austin’s most ubiquitous item of clothing, a University of Texas ball cap.
The psychological profile that Maldonado provided hardly narrowed the field either. “He may be known to get angry and express strong opinions about the government, Governor Perry himself, the death penalty, the renovation of the mansion, or other political issues,” he said at the press conference. (“That doesn’t exactly thin the herd in this town of political know-it-alls,” wrote the Austin American-Statesman’s John Kelso.) Maldonado did add, however, that the arsonist’s “skill in deploying his incendiary device suggests he has practiced constructing and throwing these devices.” He ended by addressing the perpetrator directly. “We do feel you had a message,” he said. “We’re not quite sure what that message is, and we would like to hear from you.” Then Maldonado issued a warning: “This investigation will never cease until you are identified.”
Nearly six months have passed since then, and the mystery has only deepened. The Texas Rangers, assisted by the ATF and local law enforcement agencies, are still investigating. The DPS, which released grainy surveillance footage of the perpetrator walking outside the mansion—and a videotape of the same person, or perhaps another individual, running from the fire—made a plea for the public’s assistance as long ago as July 29, with little to show for it. Arson is a notoriously difficult crime to solve; according to FBI statistics, arson investigations have an 18 percent clearance rate, compared with a 61 percent rate for murder, 54 percent for aggravated assault, and 40 percent for rape. The very nature of a fire makes it challenging to investigate: Key evidence is, of course, often destroyed, and there are rarely eyewitnesses. A house that had persevered for more than a century and a half—built when Texas was still a slave state and Austin was a settlement of about three thousand people—was undone with a single decisive throw of a bottle. Yet we are no closer to knowing who set the fire, or why, than the day it happened.
If the arsonist was trying to make a statement, what was it, exactly? And of all the Texas landmarks he could have chosen, why the Governor’s Mansion? How has he managed to keep such a low profile? Radio talk show host Alex Jones, Austin’s most celebrated conspiracy theorist, has made the dubious claim on The Alex Jones Show that there was “a very good chance the fire was an inside job” meant to help the DPS expand its counterterrorism mandate. (“DPS had an amazingly sluggish response that night,” Jones told me. “The whole thing stinks to high heaven.”) In the absence of any arrests, speculation about the arsonist’s identity has only flourished. He was a lone nut. A disgruntled state employee. Someone with a grudge against Governor Perry or even the mansion’s preceding inhabitant, George W. Bush. Or perhaps he was affiliated with the Republic of Texas, the separatist group that believes Texas is an independent nation.
In September the Dallas Morning News reported the most tantalizing story thus far, that investigators were reviewing the cases of two Austin anarchists who had been arrested during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul for possessing a stash of Molotov cocktails. Under the headline “Texas Governor’s Mansion Fire Probe Turns to Austin Men Arrested at Republican Convention,” the newspaper quoted a “high-ranking state law enforcement official,” who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying there were “enough similar characteristics in the two cases to justify a review.” Naturally, when I contacted Gerardo De Los Santos, the assistant chief of the Texas Rangers, as well as DPS spokesperson Tela Mange, they would not say whether the men were under investigation. But the notion that anarchists were to blame, and that they were hanging around Austin talking about revolution, seemed hopelessly out-of-date—as if we were living in a simpler, pre-Dellionaire era, when Charles Whitman was a recent memory.
The two anarchists in question, it turned out, were not the clove-cigarette-smoking variety but part of a new generation of political protesters who advocate such confrontational tactics as those carried out during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots, in Seattle. Brad Crowder, who is 23, and David McKay, a year his junior, were part of a group of eight Austin activists who went to St. Paul in late August, along with thousands of other protesters from around the country, to try to disrupt the Republican National Convention. The plan was to block roads and create chaos in the streets in order to prevent delegates from reaching the convention site, a strategy that resulted in clashes with police and the arrest of more than eight hundred protesters, mostly on misdemeanor charges. According to a federal affidavit, the Austin group brought a rented trailer with them to St. Paul that contained 34 homemade riot shields, which they had fashioned out of stolen traffic barrels. They never had the opportunity to use the shields, however, since police seized them on August 31.
My Library
Uncle Herman says: Well, I think this is an interesting article but I find it unlikely that anarchists were responsible for the arson fire at the mansion. I mean, this is all conjecture. No one has been arrested yet. But my reasoning is based in the fact that anarchists don’t really operate like this. They are capable of resorting to violence, most definitely, but they generally do so in two circumstances and pretty narrowly at that: a) against fascist and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizations, at political demonstrations by racist and fascist groups, b) at major meetings of financial institutions, political parties, where a lot of media attention is concentrated. In other words, the Republican National Convention, the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, and so on. Otherwise, they’re more likely to hand out food to the homeless or loiter under bridges than strike out at historic buildings. Again, this is all conjecture. What strikes me as disturbingly likely was that this arson attack was an example of far right nationalist violence. You mention Alex Jones in the article -- a lot of his listeners have been very upset with Gov. Perry over his highway program -- they fear that further links with Mexico is part of a conspiracy to undermine the strength of the nation and that through revolutionary violence the nation can be cleansed of undesirable influences. More than that, though, this could have been a response to the raid on the fringe Mormon splinter sect in El Dorado, Texas. Far right nationalists saw the federal raid on the compound as a repeat of the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. As we should be well aware, the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out as a response to the raid. There has been a lot of talk of far right violence recently, and there have been many examples: neo-Nazis arrested for plotting to kill the President, the recent shooting of the late-term abortion doctor by a right-wing anti-abortion activist, and so on. I haven’t seen any examples of anarchist violence except at the 2008 political conventions, which is ordinary for radical leftist groups. What I’m saying is that there is a pattern here of "lone wolf" style attacks by nationalists, and the fire at the governor’s mansion might fit the pattern. Yes, Austin is a left-wing kind of town. But there’s a significant presence of extreme nationalist politics, the kind of people who wave Revolutionary War flags and think they embody the mythical spirit of the Founding Fathers -- and are willing to engage in redemptive violence for the sake of violence as a result. I.E. fascist violence, Alex Jones, etc. I’ve said this before to friends, and they look at me and say: Rick Perry is a right-wing crazy person! Why would the far right have a problem with him? A cursory study of the far right terrorists I’m talking about shows that they view "the system" as corrupt, and that only a revolution against both major political parties, a complete upending of the government, can save "the nation" from disaster. The movement around Ron Paul is a good example of this sentiment. (June 5th, 2009 at 10:29pm)
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