WAS RAINBOW FARM 'OUR OWN LITTLE WACO'?

VANDALIA -- At the entrance to Rainbow Farm, a strand of yellow police tape
flaps in the cold wind and a dead brown bouquet sits beside a sign that
reads, "In Loving Memory of Tom & Rollie."

At the base of a flagpole a few yards up the driveway, there's another sign
left by supporters of Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm: "Wake Up -- Who's Next?
You?"

"After Tom and Rollie were killed, we found a Rainbow Farm flag on the
ground here and it looked like there was a bullet through it," says Trena
Moss, a local plumber and friend of Crosslin and Rohm. "We put up an
American flag, upside down."

Fat flakes of snow are falling on what's left of the Rainbow Farm
campground. Snow covers the fields where thousands of campers gathered for
the annual pro-marijuana festivals. It falls on the foundations of a
half-dozen buildings burned to the ground during a five-day siege last summer.

Snow also covers the spot where Crosslin, 46, was shot through the forehead
by an FBI sharpshooter and the place beneath a scraggly pine tree where
Rohm, 28, was killed 12 hours later by a Michigan State Police sniper.

Trena Moss stands in the falling snow and tells a story about the time
country singer Merle Haggard played a gig at one of the farm's pro-pot
festivals. "Tom told me that when Merle came here, he said to Tom and
Rollie, 'I can't believe they haven't killed you boys yet.' Rollie laughed
real hard at that."

A place in the country

"In a way," says local attorney Dan French, "it's our own little Waco."

The fatal endgame played out last Labor Day weekend, but the tension had
been building for years.

It began back in the early '90s, when Grover "Tom" Crosslin bought the
34-acre farm and an adjoining 20-acre wood near Vandalia, a hog- farming
town of a few hundred people in Cass County.

Crosslin grew up in Elkhart, Ind. When he got out of high school, he became
a truck driver, got married in his teens and divorced a couple of years
later. He started a successful business installing flagpoles and then began
buying run-down properties in Elkhart, fixing them up and selling or
renting them. He did good work, winning an award from Elkhart's Historical
and Cultural Preservation Commission in 1995.

Crosslin loved to smoke dope, his friends say, and when he got stoned, he'd
launch into loud libertarian rants about how the government had no right to
tell people what they can or can't smoke. He used to toke up with his
construction crews after work. One of his workers was Rolland Rohm, a
quiet, easygoing guy with long blond hair and a big, happy laugh. Rohm had
fathered a son at 15 and was briefly married. Soon, Tom and Rollie became a
couple.

Crosslin bought the farm in Vandalia as a place where he and Rohm could
escape their urban life in Elkhart. They loved to pick blueberries, fish in
the pond and just stroll the hills with their dog.

In the mid-'90s, Crosslin bankrolled Rohm's legal battle to gain custody of
his son, Robert, who was then about 6 years old. When Rohm won that fight,
the two men began raising the boy in Vandalia.

"Robert loved being with his dad -- the father-son relationship was just
incredible," says Tammy Brand, 32, a neighbor whose son Dairik was Robert's
best friend. The kids played baseball on a team coached by Brand's husband
and they frequently stayed at each other's houses. "Robert was here two or
three nights a week and Dairik was over there the same amount. I felt just
as comfortable with him being there as here. It was not an unsafe environment."

Brand would have been upset if Crosslin and Rohm had smoked marijuana
around her son but they never did, she says. "They kept it to themselves."

Crosslin continued developing real estate in Elkhart and one day he visited
Sondra Mose-Ursery, Vandalia's part-time mayor, to ask about real estate
prospects there. He overheard her taking a phone call from a poor woman
begging for clothes for her kids. He seemed surprised to learn of poverty
in Vandalia, she recalls, and he immediately took her out to Kmart to buy
Christmas presents for the town's poor kids.

"He bought trains and dolls and trucks," she says. "He was like a kid going
shopping, a person going back to childhood."

He also gave her a $5 bill for each kid on her Christmas list. He spent
over a thousand dollars that day, she recalls, and he didn't want any
credit for it.

But Vandalia's secret Santa also exhibited a violent streak. On April 19,
1995 -- the day of the Oklahoma City bombing -- he was arrested for assault
in a local bar. These days, Crosslin's supporters claim he was defending
himself against gay-bashers. But at the time, witnesses told police a
different story: Crosslin was ranting about the bombing when a woman told
him to shut up. Cursing, he shoved her and then hit her with the
bartender's club before the owner wrestled him to the floor.

He pleaded guilty to assault and served several months in the Cass County Jail.

When he got out, his anti-government views had hardened. He channeled his
anger into the movement to legalize marijuana. He turned Rainbow Farm into
a campground and began holding pro-pot festivals every Labor Day and
Memorial Day weekend.

"We consider this a war on us and we are fighting back." he wrote on the
farm's Web site.

Instant flashback

If you got stoned enough at one of Tom and Rollie's festivals -- and
thousands of people did -- you might think you'd traveled through time and
ended up at Woodstock.

Up onstage, the Byrds or Big Brother or some local band would be jamming.
Out in the field, where 3,000 people from all over the Midwest were camped
out, a group called Granola Funk cooked up big batches of free veggies and
performed puppet shows for the kids. Vendors sold everything from corn dogs
to handblown glass hash pipes. At the farm's store, called "The Joint," you
could buy a cappuccino or a bong. And sometimes Crosslin stood at the gate,
handing out free rolling papers.

Meanwhile, on one of the campground's hills, they would set up the "Naked
Hippie Slide" -- basically just a piece of plastic covered with soapy water
and people would strip off their clothes and slide down it, while
spectators laughed uproariously.

"The first time I went out there," says Melody Karr, 37, who volunteered in
the children's tent at festivals, "I said, 'Wow! Hippies really do exist! I
heard they'd died out.'''

But the festivals also had a serious political purpose -- proselytizing for
Michigan lawyer Greg Schmid's "Personal Responsibility Amendment," designed
to decriminalize marijuana. Schmid set up booths, where he gathered
signatures on petitions to get the amendment on the Michigan ballot.

"Rainbow Farm was the conduit for people interested in marijuana law
reform," Schmid says. "The best petitioners I met, I met through Rainbow Farm."

Lots of folks loved the Rainbow Farm festivals, but Scott Teter was not one
of them.

Teter, 39, is the Cass County prosecutor. He first learned of problems at
the Rainbow Farm festivals in 1997, when police got complaints about noise
and litter and sent a warning letter to Crosslin. In 1999, after reports of
blatant dope-smoking at the festivals, Teter wrote a second letter, this
time warning the property could be seized as a public nuisance if Crosslin
permitted drug use on his land.

That threat angered Crosslin, who fired back a long, pugnacious reply: "I
have discussed this with my family and we are all prepared to die on this
land before we allow it to be stolen from us. How should we be prepared to
die? Are you planning to burn us out like they did at Waco, or will you
have snipers shoot us through our windows like the Weavers at Ruby Ridge?
Maybe the Govenor [sic] can call in the National Guard for another Kent
State ... ''

'Head-butting'

Teter huddled with state and county police to figure out how to handle the
festivals. They quickly agreed making dope busts in a crowd of 3,000
potheads was not the best option.

So they combined harassment with surveillance. Police patrolled the roads
leading to the festivals, stopping cars on any pretext and searching them
for dope. Undercover police infiltrated the festivals and hidden police
cameras videotaped all sorts of antics, including security guards smoking
joints.

Twice, Teter sued to stop the festivals under an ordinance that required
permits for gatherings of more than 500 people. Crosslin won both times,
claiming the ordinance exempted nonprofits and the festivals were sponsored
by an obscure Ohio-based group.

"This head-butting went on for years," Tammy Brand says. "What it reminded
me of was the Dukes of Hazzard vs. Boss Hogg."

In April 2001, a 17-year-old died when his car hit a school bus in Berrien
County. Police said the teen-ager had gone to a Rainbow Farms festival the
day before and had marijuana in his bloodstream.

After that, Teter decided to use another weapon against the farm, the same
weapon the feds once used against Al Capone -- taxes.

A woman who'd worked at the Joint told police that Crosslin was paying some
employees off the books. Teter passed that information to the Michigan
Treasury Department, which obtained a warrant to search the farm for tax
records.

Early on the morning of May 9, some 30 state police officers dressed in
combat fatigues and black ski masks raided Rainbow Farm, rousing sleeping
staffers and campers and pointing guns in their groggy faces.

That show of force was necessary, Teter says, because of Crosslin's 1999
letter: "There was at least the possibility that he'd do what he said and
attempt to harm officers."

Crosslin didn't do that but he did scream at the police, call them Nazis
and worse. Rohm, typically, was much quieter. The police claim they found
him in the farmhouse basement, trying to stash 300 pot plants into garbage
cans. Upstairs, police found more pot and a couple of loaded rifles.

Teter charged Crosslin and Rohm with manufacturing marijuana, running a
drug house and possession of firearms while committing a felony. He also
charged Crosslin with possession of guns by a convicted felon.

Both men faced more than 20 years in prison. And Teter wasn't done with
them yet.

Crossing the Rubicon

The prosecutor got a court order forbidding festivals on Rainbow Farm and
filed papers to seize the farm as a public nuisance. And he worked with the
county to remove Robert from his father's custody for "neglect secondary to
criminal behavior."

One day, Robert didn't come home from school. Children's Protective
Services had grabbed the 12-year-old off the playground. After a hearing
the next day, he was placed with a foster family in a nearby town -- a
foster family headed by a retired policeman.

Rohm was devastated. "Rollie had tears in his eyes," says Brand. "The man
had lost his son. He felt helpless and hopeless."

Now, the two men not only faced decades in prison, but they were also
likely to lose their land and they'd already lost Robert.

"Tom was defiant but Rollie was scared," says Dori Leo, the lawyer who
handled their criminal cases.

Leo, a former Chicago prosecutor, felt that Teter was too hard on the men,
particularly Rohm. "He had the owner of the farm in his grasp, so why be so
tenacious about Rollie?" she asks.

"I took an oath when I took this office to enforce the law as it's written,
not as I want it to be," Teter says. "There isn't a let-them- do-it option."

Crosslin was enraged. Ignoring the court order, he held a festival in
mid-August. It wasn't much of a gathering -- only a few dozen people showed
up and two of them were undercover officers.

The police told Teter that Crosslin offered them a hit on his pot pipe.
Teter asked the court to revoke the two men's bond. A hearing was scheduled
for Aug. 31.

For Crosslin, that was it. He had no intention of going to jail, he told
friends, and if the government seized his land, he'd make sure there was
nothing left on it.

"I'm going to die on my farm, not in prison," he told Doug Leinbach, a
former manager of Rainbow Farm.

During the last week of August, Crosslin and Rohm drew up identical
handwritten wills, leaving all their possessions to Rohm's son. Then they
started giving away stuff, letting the hippies who hung around the
campground help themselves to whatever they wanted from the Joint.

As their court date approached, Crosslin left a note in an old brick house
he was renovating in downtown Vandalia:

"The action we must take now is not what we wanted. We would have prefered
[sic] a peaceful end to the drug war. . . . No longer are we talking peace.
The Government must be stopped. Scott Teter knew what was coming. . . . Our
police no longer serve and protect us. We need protection from peopel [sic]
we hired to protect us. . . . Let the battle begin."

The first shot

Buggy Brown had just finished milking the cows when he saw smoke coming
from Rainbow Farm.

It was the morning of Friday, Aug. 31, the day Crosslin and Rohm were due
in court. Brown, 35, is a thin, thoughtful man with a goatee and a
ponytail, an old toking buddy of Tom and Rollie who worked at a farm just
down the road.

Brown hustled over to Rainbow Farm and saw that the VIP room -- the little
building where bands waited to go onstage -- was burning. He asked Rohm
what was going on.

"It's time," Rohm said.

That sounded ominous. Brown whipped out a pipe, and he and Rohm shared a
few tokes.

Then Brown left and called the police, telling them that the fire was
contained and it might be best if they didn't go out to Rainbow Farm. The
police took that to mean they might be ambushed and they set up roadblocks
to seal off the area.

At the courthouse, Dori Leo waited for her clients. Teter told her that
fires were blazing at Rainbow Farm and they drove out there. Police
wouldn't let Leo go to her clients -- too dangerous, they said.

Instead, Leo talked to them by phone. "Tom was just ranting and raving
about the government," she says, "whereas Rollie was asking questions about
the situation he was in. He was scared."

Hovering above the farm was a helicopter from WNDU-TV in South Bend, Ind.
The helicopter left after police said somebody was shooting at them. Back
in South Bend, station officials found a bullet hole in the tail of the
chopper, about two feet from the gas tank.

After completing his afternoon milking, Brown returned to the farmhouse. By
now Crosslin and Rohm were dressed in camouflage uniforms and carrying
rifles. More buildings, including the Joint, were burning.

"We sat on the back porch and watched the store burn," he says.

He smoked a bowl with Rohm -- Crosslin wasn't smoking -- and then he left,
with a message from Crosslin for the TV people:

Sorry about the helicopter. It was blue and white and looked like a cop
chopper.

The FBI arrives

The next morning, a Saturday, Brown bought breakfast at McDonald's and took
it up to Rainbow Farm. The three men ate and smoked some weed and shot the
breeze.

That's the way it went for the next two days. Brown visited several times a
day, carrying messages back and forth. At one point, Crosslin said he
wanted to talk to the media. The police nixed the idea, saying if Crosslin
wanted to talk to anybody he should talk to them. But he didn't want to
talk to police. In fact, when they set up loudspeakers and started talking
to him, somebody shot at the speakers from the house.

Inside the house, Crosslin and Rohm were calm, watching TV, taking showers,
smoking weed, Brown says. "Rollie was the same old Rollie, extremely
mellow," he says. "Tom was composed but firm. He had a purpose -- to
protect his property. You're not talking about people who had lost it."

Outside, the state police had brought in an armored personnel carrier
borrowed from the Michigan National Guard. On Sunday, the FBI arrived, more
than 50 strong, summoned to the scene because the helicopter shooting was a
federal crime.

"We were strictly in a defensive position," says John Bell, head of the
FBI's Detroit office, who was in command. "There were no offensive moves
made. We were just trying to contain the situation."

The FBI and the state police took turns guarding the area. On Sunday
afternoon, the state police left and the FBI took over. Three FBI SWAT
teams, each composed of three sharpshooters, took positions inside Rainbow
Farm. Camouflaged, they lay in the woods all night, armed with rifles,
keeping an eye on the farmhouse.

Monday morning, Brown found that Crosslin and Rohm had a visitor. Brandon
Peoples, a local 18-year-old, had wandered onto the farm and was sitting
calmly in the living room.

Crosslin used a cell phone to call the FBI, saying he and Rohm wanted to
speak to Rohm's son. The FBI refused.

"This is a boy of some tender years," Bell explains. "We weren't about to
put him on there without having some knowledge of what they would be
confronting this kid with."

Not long after that, Crosslin left the house, carrying his rifle, followed
by Peoples. They walked through the woods -- right past one of the FBI's
hidden SWAT teams -- and to a neighbor's farmhouse, where they picked up
some food and a coffee maker. But they forgot the coffeepot and went to
retrieve it.

They stopped in the woods to rest for a moment. Then, according to Bell,
Crosslin spotted an FBI agent lying on the ground about 20 feet away, and
he raised his rifle to his shoulder.

When he did that, two agents fired, one of them shooting Crosslin through
the forehead, killing him instantly.

"He died before he hit the ground," says Bell.

Peoples fell, too, fragments of Crosslin's skull and brain splattered
across his face. Perhaps he could confirm or deny the FBI account of the
shooting, but he refuses to talk to reporters.

Negotiation

Crosslin was carrying a walkie-talkie when he was shot. The FBI picked it
up, called Rohm, told him his buddy would not be coming back.

They kept up contact with Rohm for a while but then he stopped responding.
"Rollie, pick up the radio," they called. But they got no answer.

After dusk, the FBI's 24-hour shift ended and the state police SWAT teams
took over. It began to rain, hard.

Rohm agreed to accept a telephone and the state police drove up to the
house in the armored personnel carrier and threw a phone toward the porch.
Rohm retrieved it and began talking.

Around 10 that night, Rohm's son Robert called Tammy Brand, the mother of
his best friend. "Tom is dead," he told her, crying. "Don't let them kill
my dad."

She promised to try to help and she drove to the nearest police barricade.
A couple dozen protesters -- most of them friends of Crosslin and Rohm --
stood in the rain holding soggy signs. When Brand approached the police,
they pointed rifles at her. For 45 minutes, she begged them to talk to her.
Finally, she was called into a police car. Crying, she told the police
about the call from Robert and she offered to go to the farmhouse -- or at
least talk to Rollie on the phone. They declined her offer.

"They said it would just cause more emotional turmoil," she says.

At about 1 or 2 in the morning, Rohm talked to Dori Leo on the phone,
asking questions about how much jail time he faced. That was a good sign,
she thought: "When somebody asks you questions about the future, you figure
he thinks he's got a future."

But when he asked to speak to his son, she started to worry, figuring he
wanted to say goodbye.

Somewhere around 3 a.m., Rohm stopped talking and the police decided to
shake him up a little, says Lt. Mike Risko of the state police. They fired
a 37mm "dummy round" -- a piece of hard rubber -- at the house, smashing a
window. Rohm picked up the phone and asked why they were shooting. They
started negotiating again and at 3:45 Rohm agreed to surrender at 7 if the
officers would bring Robert. They agreed.

"I went home thinking, 'We've got this pretty well wrapped up,'" Risko says.

But shortly after 6 a.m., police spotted a fire blazing in the farmhouse.
At 6:31 Rohm walked out in camouflage fatigues, his face masked with
camouflage paint, and crouched between two pine trees.

The state troopers drove toward Rohm and the burning house in an armored
personnel carrier. As they got close they were blinded by the smoke. Two
troopers stuck their heads out to see better, Risko says, and Rohm raised
his rifle and pointed it at them. At that moment, two state police snipers
fired from 150 yards away.

One missed. The other shot through the stock of Rohm's rifle and into his
chest, killing him.

Controversy continues

Crosslin and Rohm are dead now, but the controversy over Rainbow Farm lives on.

The official investigation into the killing of the men was conducted by
Scott Teter. He concluded that the deaths were "justifiable homicide."

John Bell agrees. "This is probably nothing more than suicide-by-cop," he
says. "I'm convinced that these guys were at the end of their rope and they
wanted to die and if they took a couple of police officers with them, that
was OK."

Leo isn't convinced. "What do we do with an animal that's out of control?
We shoot it with a tranquilizer," she says. "The police were lying in wait.
They saw my clients coming and going in the house and walking the property.
They had opportunities to either maim or tranquilize them. Why wasn't that
done?"

Grover Crosslin, Tom's father, is more blunt: "He was murdered, I'd say."

He feels the same about Rohm's death: "They burned the house down to get
him out and when he came out, they shot him."

Crosslin has hired a lawyer and plans to file a wrongful-death suit.

That won't be the only legal proceeding in this case. Teter still plans to
seize Rainbow Farm as a public nuisance.

In his will, Tom Crosslin left the farm to Robert Rohm. Now, Teter says,
he's worried that the boy -- or somebody else -- might turn the place into
a memorial to Crosslin and Rohm and continue holding pro- pot festivals.

"What better way to talk about their cause than to stand on their graves
and reminisce about them?" he says. "It would give them a great platform
and they'd be out here doing the same things they did for the last six years."