LONG TIME GONE

A Dozen Years After Fleeing the Valley, Bill Conde Remains As Pro-Hemp As Ever

Editor's note: Today is the first installment in a monthly series
that revisits and updates stories we reported on as the 21st century
began a dozen years ago.

Lots of people around the mid-valley remember William Conde, formerly
of Harrisburg, who from 1984 to 2001 was a lumberyard owner, festival
promoter, failed candidate for governor and champion of hemp and of
legalizing marijuana.

The impressions of him, developed before he moved to Central America,
remain quite vivid to his former customers, the law enforcement
officers who investigated him, the Linn County Board of Commissioners
that dealt with him, and the reporters who wrote about him.

Conde, 68, lives in his former wife's homeland of Belize, where he
has dual citizenship with the United States.

The Democrat-Herald contacted Conde via email to find out how his
life was going. He said he earns his living importing hemp seed oil
in bulk from Canada to make skin products, and at one time he wrote a
column titled "Hemp Hemp Hooray" for the Belize Times. He offered to
send a Democrat-Herald reporter some of his hemp products. The
reporter declined.

He also concocts herbal medicines, primarily for men, from wild herbs
he finds in a nearby rainforest.

Information about his products and his philosophy concerning hemp and
legalizing marijuana appear on his website: belizehemp.com.

Outside of work, he is considering sponsoring fundraisers for BHI
(which he pronounces "be high"), a Belize Hemp Initiative. And now
that he has Belize citizenship, he wants to organize a national
campaign there to legalize cannabis in all of its forms.

While in Harrisburg, Conde and the Linn board of commissioners
engaged in running battles as he openly flouted the county's mass
gathering regulations in the late 1990s. Because of the way he staged
two of the events, he was slapped with criminal charges.

Then in May 2001, he was convicted by a jury of aiding and abetting
in the delivery of a controlled substance and of hindering
prosecution, both felonies.

Conde filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the county,
alleging that his family and his business suffered because of the
county's actions. His suit contended that the sheriff's office
committed perjury, mishandled evidence and corrupted the proceedings
in his trial.

The suit also said the county reneged on an agreement for the
supervision of his 1999 hemp festival.

In a deal worked out with prosecutor George Eder and Linn Circuit
Court Judge Carol Bispham, Conde's conviction on a pair of felony
charges was allowed to stand and he was barred from filing any appeals.

He was allowed to leave the state and he had to stay gone for five
years. If he returned early, he would be placed on supervised probation.

Earlier this week, Commissioner Roger Nyquist recalled coming on the
board in January 2001 as the county was getting ready to approve his
last outdoor assembly permit.

"It was a 2-1 vote in favor, and I voted no," he said. "I didn't
think the application was complete. We were giving him discretion way
beyond what the rest of the business community in Linn County had to
do in conforming to the rules."

While the board was ruling, Conde was sitting in jail, Nyquist said.

"The board held 11 meetings before I was here working on an approval
for his outdoor assembly," he said. "It was my first month in office
and I thought, man, oh man, I don't want to deal with anything 11 times."

Nyquist gives Conde credit for being "a pretty creative guy who
couldn't stay out of his own way. Who can from a jail cell decide to
run for governor and use his hemp festival as an attempt to gather
signatures to get his name on the ballot?"

Larry Johnson, a former county commissioner, referred to Conde this
week as a "very colorful individual. Very smart. Very articulate. He
was out of the '60s, a free spirit, a hippie-style individual."

Johnson also called Conde "hard-headed, with a mind of his own."

The former commissioner said he didn't have "a real hard time with
Bill per se. It was a land-use action for his music festivals that
got Bill into all of his trouble. He was trying to circumvent the
land-use rules. He actually was likable."

Dave Burright, who was sheriff at the time, said Conde figured out
ways to work the system to get what he wanted, "and that's something
we didn't put up with. He's one guy I get asked about to this day
about whatever happened to him."

Sam Suklis of Albany said he and a friend once drove to Conde's
Redwood Lumber in Harrisburg to buy materials for a couple of projects.

"We went into this building and the hi-fi speakers were so loud it
was deafening," said Suklis, a retired Democrat-Herald advertising
salesman. "We found him and he motioned for us to go outside,
explaining his telephone was taken apart and spread all over because
the authorities were listening to him, and they had bugs everywhere,
and the only place he could talk freely was outside."

Suklis called his visit "quite strange. He jumped from topic to
topic. Buying lumber from him once was enough. It was a little uncomfortable."

Former Democrat-Herald reporter Marilyn Montgomery Smith remembered
Conde this way: "I do recall several lengthy phone conversations with
Mr. Conde when he was planning or hosting the events at his lumber
yard. He was utterly charming and very witty on the phone and
obviously at odds with the Linn County Sheriff's Office."

Conde said in a recent email he was born in Hayward, Calif., and
moved to Harrisburg in 1984. He has no plans to return to the United States.

"I love living here in Belize," he said. "The village contains about
1,300 people, and the area is peaceful and fertile. I don't have the
money that I used to, but I have the greatest wealth of all, which is
good health and spiritual well being. My wife, Ruby, left a little
over a year after we arrived, and I am raising my two sons as a
single parent." Conde said his former wife and her husband live with
Conde's daughter about 100 yards from Conde's house.

"My two boys and I live in a nice home that I built while I still had
a lumber yard," he said. "Many nights I dream of being back at my old
business, but I always realize it is just a dream. It took me almost
30 years to build Conde's Redwood Lumber from a $700 start in Cottage Grove."

At the end of his email he said: "I'll write more whenever you ask.
There is much more to say, but I must write as the spirit moves me."
He signed his email: "From the 60s to my 60s. Remember, Peace and
Love. William Conde."

He did not respond to subsequent requests for current photos or to
provide answers to several follow-up questions.