EarthFirst! / ELF

420 bak textuber 1 history ucsc:<a href="https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-795">https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-795</a>tigerswarm used mag at standing rock as evidence of eco-terror
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/trumps-lawyers-sue-greenpeace-over-dapl-making-jaw-dropping-accusations">http://www.alternet.org/environment/trumps-lawyers-sue-greenpeace-over-dapl-making-jaw-dropping-accusations</a>Still reeling from a D.C. district court <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/dakota-access-standing-rock-sioux-victory-court/530427/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">loss</a> in June, Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), has sued Greenpeace and other environmental groups in a <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/topics/energy-transfer-equity" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$300 million racketeering case</a>, accusing them of inciting terrorism, fraud and defamation and violating state and federal RICO laws.On Tuesday, ETP released a statement alleging that Greenpeace, BankTrack and Earth First "manufactured and disseminated materially <a href="http://ens-newswire.com/2017/08/22/dakota-access-pipeline-owner-sues-enviros-for-terrorism/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">false and misleading information</a> about Energy Transfer and the Dakota Access Pipeline for the purpose of fraudulently inducing donations, interfering with pipeline construction activities and damaging Energy Transfer's critical business and financial relationships."In its <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Energy%20Transfer%20v%20GP%20-%20Complaint%20NDakota%2017cv173.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">187-page complaint</a>, ETP alleges that "putative not-for-profits and rogue eco-terrorist groups who employ patterns of criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation to target legitimate companies and industries with fabricated environmental claims and other purported misconduct" caused the Fortune 500 natural gas company to lose "billions of dollars."The Dallas-based firm made other outrageous claims against the groups, including funding terrorism and "using donations to fund a lucrative drug trafficking scheme inside the camps."ETP is represented by the law firm Kasowitz, Benson & Torres LLP. Partner Marc Kasowitz is a member of the legal team representing the president in the ongoing congressional and special counsel investigation into possible collusion between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russian state actors.This is the second consecutive year Trump's attorneys have filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace. In 2016, Resolute Forest Products, a paper and pulp company based in Montreal that was stripping grounds in Northern Ontario and Quebec, <a href="http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/court-rules-7-million-lawsuit-by-resolute-forest-products-against-greenpeace-allowed-to-continue" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">filed a suit</a> against the group for defamation and threatening its customers.Responding to Tuesday's ETP filing, Greenpeace attorney Tom Wetterer said Trump's lawyers are "apparently trying to market themselves as corporate mercenaries willing to abuse the legal system to silence legitimate advocacy work." He added:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This complaint repackages spurious allegations and legal claims made against Greenpeace by the Kasowitz firm on behalf of Resolute Forest Products in a lawsuit filed in May 2016. It is yet another classic “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” (SLAPP), not designed to seek justice, but to silence free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation. This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies, with <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-response-to-energy-transfer-partners-lawsuit/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Trump’s attorneys leading the way</a>.</blockquote>The Dakota Access Pipeline has been a source of contention since 2014, when ETP applied for a 1,200-mile land grant to build in North and South Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation, the sixth largest Native American reservation in the U.S. in terms of land area. The reservation encompasses the Black Hills, sacred land for the Sioux, who argue that the pipeline would not only damage their sacred sites, but would threaten the Missouri River, their only water supply.When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the pipeline permit, thousands flocked to the convergence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers to peacefully protest the construction, establishing the Standing Rock encampment in April 2016.<div alt="" class="media-image" height="473" width="840" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 600px; height: 338px;">pic]However, demonstrations turned violent as heavily armed police, SWAT teams and unlicensed security personnel launched military-style assaults, using tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets and water cannons against the unarmed water protectors.</div><div alt="" class="media-image" height="660" width="990" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 600px; height: 400px;">pic]</div><div alt="" class="media-image" height="660" width="990" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 600px; height: 400px;">Just four days after taking office in January, President Trump overturned President Obama's early December decision to halt DAPL construction. By mid-February, aggressive force by officials pushed the water protectors off the land, effectively shutting down the Standing Rock encampment.Beyond the fact that his own lawyers are building ETP's case against Greenpeace, Trump has a vested interest in the pipeline's completion, having invested up to <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/dakota-access-and-trump-have-deep-ties-5771cc7b63c7/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$1 million</a> in ETP, according to disclosure forms related to the 2016 presidential campaign.</div>ETF's CEO Kelcy Warren donated <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/dakota-access-and-trump-have-deep-ties-5771cc7b63c7/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$100,000</a> to the Trump Victory Fund.In September, Desmogblog reported that Harold Hamm, energy adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign and CEO of Continental Resources, a fossil fuel exploration and production company, told investors he would <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-dakota-access-pipeline-1998966014.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">ship oil</a> through the Dakota Access line.[pic]The Standing Rock/DAPL battle continued in the legal system until June 14, when D.C. district court judge James Boasberg declared the Army Corps of Engineers study of "the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/dakota-access-standing-rock-sioux-victory-court/530427/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">impacts of an oil spill</a> on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice" deficient. He ordered a new study to be conducted and a case on both sides presented.While considered a major victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and environmentalists, the ruling did not halt construction. In fact, there have been <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-dakota-access-pipeline-sprung-2-new-leaks-2017-5" style="text-decoration-line: none;">three leaks</a> since Trump's order that the pipeline be completed. Anti-pipeline activists are pushing Judge Boasberg to shut down the operation during the environmental review, which can take between one and three years to complete. His decision may come as soon as <a href="http://www.colorlines.com/articles/update-judge-likely-make-decision-dapl-operations-september" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">next month</a>.ETP's lawsuit is part of an effort to brand the activists as terrorists. To counter the Standing Rock protesters, the company hired TigerSwan, a group founded by retired members of a U.S. military counterterrorism unit, Delta Force. It was later revealed in private documents acquired by the Intercept that TigerSwan had likened the demonstrators to "<a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">jihadists</a>" and the movement “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component."In an <a href="http://fair.org/home/the-fight-doesnt-end-until-we-stop-it-at-the-source/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">interview</a> last week with CounterSpin, Kandi Mosset, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said "we have to really focus on placing the blame where it squarely belongs, which is on the <a href="http://fair.org/home/the-fight-doesnt-end-until-we-stop-it-at-the-source/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">industry and the corporations</a>."Mosset has faith that despite small setbacks, “Hope is alive. They’ll never, ever, ever take our hope from us, and that’s the most important and powerful thing that came out of Standing Rock,” she said. "That fire that burned that whole time is still burning in all of our hearts, and it will continue to do so until we win."Who's terrorizing whom? Watch this video and decide for yourself:A <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/wp-content/Images/2009_us_army_tradoc_terrorist_insurgent_and_militant_group_logo_recognition_guide_15_feb_09.pdf" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">U.S. Army training manual</a> that instructs troops how to recognize terrorist organizations includes environmental groups like Earth First!, and lists the Animal Liberation Front alongside al-Qaeda.The declassified manual was created by the <a href="http://www.tradoc.army.mil/" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command</a>, which says “This handbook is designed to specifically provide trainers, leaders and soldiers a ‘hip pocket’ reference to identify all the known logos used by insurgents, terrorists, paramilitary and other militant groups worldwide.”Among the listings are a page on “Environmental Terrorists,” with images of Earth First! t-shirts and patches, and “animal liberation” t-shirts that have been sold by national non-profits since the 1990s.Other terrorism threats identified in the United States include the Weather Underground, which dissolved in the 1970s.<a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/wp-content/Images/us_army_tradoc_alf.jpg" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-7290" alt="us_army_tradoc_alf" src="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/wp-content/Images/us_army_tradoc_alf-300x225.jpg" width="300" height="225" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.538em 1.538em; border: none; float: right;" /></a>The 60+ page guide does include information on groups which, unlike Earth First!, have actually harmed human beings. However, this training guide offers no information on the types of threats these groups pose, and in doing so presents non-violent activists as violent threats. For example, one page on terrorism groups in the United Kingdom lists the Animal Liberation Front side-by-side with Al Qaeda.As <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/us-army-guide-designates-palestinian-flag-terrorist-logo" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Ali Abunimah notes at ElectronicIntifida.net</a> notes, the guide also conflates insurgent groups with entire communities:<blockquote style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0.769em; margin: 0px 0px 1.538em 0.769em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); line-height: 19.9844px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">on page 31 of the army guide itself, a simple Palestinian flag appears next to the name “Abu Nidal Organization (Sunni).”The group, notorious in the 1970s, is <a href="http://www.start.umd.edu/start/data_collections/tops/terrorist_organization_profile.asp?id=1" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">designated as “inactive”</a> by the US Department of Homeland Security-funded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland…In any case, even if the Palestinian flag were indeed the logo of any specific organization, the guide provides no warning or caveat that the Palestinian flag by itself should not be “recognized” as the symbol of a “terrorist, insurgent or militant” group given its global recognition as the flag of a country.</blockquote>What’s especially troubling about a guide like this is that it is created “to assist units in identifying groups by their logos found in videos, magazines, newspapers, graffiti and other types of media.” In other words, it’s meant to be a cipher for decoding First Amendment activity that might be created by “terrorists.”This has real-world consequences, as groups like Earth First! are putting their bodies on the line through tree sits, road blockades, and non-violent civil disobedience to stop environmental destruction. The <a href="http://marcellusearthfirst.org/" target="blank" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Marcellus Shale campaign against fracking</a> is just one example. Teaching military and law enforcement that these activists are on par with al-Qaeda, and that anyone who wears this logo is part of that threat, could have dangerous consequences.==FBI records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that

the FBI infiltrated and spied on Earth First! almost from its beginning

in 1980, with the earliest known FBI report on it dated 1981. Heavily

censored FBI documents obtained through Bari's suit indicate weekly

meetings in spring 1990 between an FBI agent and a secret informant in

Northern California. Deposition testimony by Oakland Police Department

officers and FBI agents states the FBI had an informant on EF! leaders,

and the FBI told OPD that Darryl and Judi were already "the subjects of

an investigation in the terrorist field" when they were bombed. Were

they under surveillance when the bomb was placed?

Just before the bombing, the FBI was wrapping up Operation Thermcon in

Arizona, a 3-year sting operation employing over 50 FBI agents designed

to entrap and discredit EF! and its co-founder Dave Foreman as

explosive-using terrorists. The FBI infiltrated a tiny Arizona EF! group

with an undercover agent provocateur, won their trust over a couple of

years, and tried to con them into using thermite, an explosive

incendiary, to take down a power line. The activists declined the

infiltrator's offer to provide explosives, and he settled for providing

them with a cutting torch instead. The FBI provocateur provided the

equipment, trained the activists in its use, chose the target, drove

them to the site, and joined an FBI strike team in busting them in the

act on May 31, 1989. Foreman was not directly involved, but was charged

with conspiracy for providing $100 to the group. The resulting "Arizona

Five" trial ended in plea bargains in August, 1991, with prison

sentences for two of the activists.

Thermcon was the FBI's code name for "thermite conspiracy," but there

was no thermite involved except in the FBI plot to tie EF! to explosives

despite the fact they have never advocated or used explosives in their

19-year history. The FBI's goal in Thermcon was basically public

relations, to trick the public into believing EF! were violent

extremists so as to neutralize their effectiveness and isolate them from

public support.

Michael Fain, the FBI's undercover agent provocateur in the Arizona

case, accidentally recorded his conversation with other agents. It

revealed that the FBI's true goal was to discredit Earth First! and

radical environmentalism in the public mind. On the tape, Fain is heard

to say, "I don't really look for them to be doing a lot of hurting

people. (Foreman) isn't really the guy we need to pop -- I mean in terms

of an actual perpetrator. This is the guy we need to pop to send a

message. And that's all we're really doing. . . . Uh-oh! We don't need

that on tape! Hoo boy!"

Some of the same San Francisco FBI terrorist squad agents who worked the

Thermcon case were assigned to the Bari bomb case. The FBI tried for

years to keep their Thermcon files secret from Bari's lawyers, claiming

there was no connection, but they were finally ordered by the court to

furnish copies in 1996, three years after the FBI's first release of

files in the case.

But the FBI is apparently hiding sixteen crucial documents they claim

are "missing" from the Thermcon file. They span a period from just after

Redwood Summer was announced, in March, 1990, to a month after the

bombing. Bari lawyer Dennis Cunningham wrote in a brief: "Plaintiffs are

of the opinion that the missing (documents) showed political

surveillance and other illicit operations against Earth First! in

California, and Redwood Summer, having nothing to do with THERMCON; as

such, given the charges herein, they were too hot to handle, and so were

simply iced...."

The FBI - Timber Connection

The

Bari - Cherney lawsuit also turned up several connections between the

timber industry and the FBI, including a chummy "Dear Bill" letter sent

to FBI Director William Sessions by a board member of Maxxam, which owns

Pacific Lumber.

Other associations are more disturbing because they involve bombs and

bomb-making. Just a month before the bomb exploded in Bari's car, the

FBI conducted a bomb investigator school in Humboldt County.

As part of the training, lead instructor and FBI bomb expert Special

Agent Frank Doyle blew up cars with pipe bombs on a Louisiana Pacific

logging site, then his students practiced investigating the results.

Louisiana Pacific, remember, was the company whose timberlands Judi

asked Mendocino County to seize, after which she immediately began

receiving death threats.

=<a href="https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-accidental-ecoterrorist/">https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-accidental-ecoterrorist/</a><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">ILLY COTTRELL WOULD TELL YOU THAT THE MOST logical place to begin this story is 17 years ago at Beverly Hills Elementary School—which happens to be in Concord, North Carolina, not Southern California. Most students lucky enough to have gone there would remember the campus for its lovely midcentury modern main building, its gentle hills and dogwood trees, its shady paths and manicured lawns. For Cottrell, Beverly Hills Elementary was a miserable experience—a hothouse of isolation and dread. “Though the teachers and students may have been on opposite sides, it seemed they at least shared a mutual enemy,” he says. “I felt as if I was entering a was zone with no allies.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">A scrawny, blond-haired first grader with huge tortoise-shell glasses, Cottrell was infatuated with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I was immediately hooked,” he says. “The subject is so interesting, pure, and to me, spiritual.” Cottrell was considerably smarter than everybody else and took no pains to conceal his superiority, however much kids picked on him for it. At recess he could be found sitting on the monkey bars, lost in quasars, quarks, and gravitational irregularities, safe for a while from his almost daily pummelings and the exasperation of his teacher, who nicknamed him “space cadet.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">When he was ten, he filled in the blanks of a test designed to get him in touch with his feelings: “I feel misunderstood when … I try to explain relativity.” “When I grow up, I want to be … an astro- or nuclear physicist.” “I don’t like … pollution.” “I feel afraid … when I think that in four billion years the sun will destroy the earth.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">By the summer of 2003, Cottrell was a doctoral candidate in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Almost blind through his youth without his glasses, he had grown out of his farsightedness. No longer the shrimp of elementary school, he was over six feet, powerfully if leanly built, with a club kid’s thatch of flaxen hair. Cottrell was studying god-awful hours, forgoing parties, missing a lot of sleep, nonetheless leading what he’d call a rather perfect life in Pasadena. Even at Caltech, one of the great research institutes of the United States, Cottrell’s intellect set him apart. He was one of seven incoming students who had hoped to earn their Ph.D.s in string theory, an esoteric branch of theoretical physics that may eventually explain away all matter and energy as one vast subatomic symphony. During his first semester, only Cottrell had shown enough promise to secure a faculty sponsor in the field.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Perhaps in a slightly different universe, Cottrell’s story, begun in such sorrow, might have ended with his vindication as a Nobel Prize winner, or at least as one of the more formidable young scientific minds of our day. But that is not what this story is about. Last November, in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, he was found guilty of eight counts of arson and arson conspiracy for the torching of an SUV dealership in West Covina—the culmination of a night of mayhem in which more than a hundred sport utility vehicles were vandalized with spray paint and 26 others went up in flames.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">As he faced arson, conspiracy, and weapons charges, Cottrell denied not only starting any of the fires but having any inkling of what was in store that night until the first firebomb was lit. The worst offense Cottrell would admit to was spray painting. Under federal law, tagging is not a crime. But for the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI, three letters that Cottrell and his fellow vandals spelled out over and over again that night would prove more incendiary than any of the arsons. In red, white, and blue spray paint, ELF appeared on dozens of hoods, doors, fenders, and windows. It was a signature federal prosecutors and investigators knew well, a signature that would bring the machinery of the U.S. justice system bearing down on whoever scrawled it. For the past seven years, the loose association of environmental radicals known as the Earth Liberation Front had burned and broken more than $100 million in private property belonging to timber companies, suburban subdividers, and others whom they had identified as destroyers of the earth. Despite the work of 84 FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, despite the identification of the ELF as a major domestic terrorism threat in the months following the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, ELF activists operated with near impunity.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">While his coconspirators managed to evade capture, Billy Cottrell would distinguish himself not as a scientist but as the first ELF-affiliated criminal found guilty by a federal jury. He currently occupies a cell in the San Bernardino County central jail, where he awaits a sentence of 5 to 19 years. His fate will be determined a few days before this magazine reaches the newsstands.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">CALTECH STUDENTS HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF pulling pranks. In 1984, the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl was rewired to display CALTECH 38, MIT 9, although neither team was competing there. For Hollywood’s centennial, the Hollywood sign was altered to read CALTECH. As the Voyager space probes made their journeys past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, both carried inscriptions that were inside jokes about the school’s dining clubs. In the summer of 2003, Cottrell and his friend Tyler Johnson, a slim Pennsylvanian finishing up his last year at Caltech as an undergraduate, made some minor contributions to this heritage. One evening they sealed a Pasadena Starbucks and altered the B to an F. They also plastered GO METRIC! bumper stickers around campus. <p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">There is a photo of Cottrell in a national park perched at the edge of a precipice that makes the stomach drop just to look at it; in another outdoor shot, he’s stripped to the wrest and pointing to a freshly wounded forearm missing half its skin. Cottrell had met Johnson in a quantum-optics class and realized that here was someone who shared his love for physical risk. Together they climbed boulders and multistory buildings and haunted construction sites at night. According to what Johnson told his friends, Cottrell usually took the lead. “I went to Joshua Tree with Billy,” one friend remembers Johnson telling him. “I wanted to climb a rock that was this tall and this steep, and Billy found a rock that was three times as tall and twice as steep. You had to be suicidal even to think about climbing it. Billy would say, ‘I’m going to climb it, and you’re going to climb it, too.'” In the early morning hours of August 22, 2003, their high jinks escalated into the most serious ecoterror attack in the history of L.A. County.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Having fled, Johnson is unavailable to explain what transpired the night of the arsons. And Cottrell is an imperfect narrator of their crimes, not just in light of the seriousness of the charges lodged against him. He’s had this lifelong tendency to exaggerate, and he’s been diagnosed with a psychological disorder that may impair his judgment of other people’s motives. In Cottrell’s version of events, Johnson displays all the cunning, initiative, and daring, and Cottrell a sleepwalker’s passivity and a child’s naivete.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">On the afternoon of August 21, Cottrell says, he was in his office at Caltech, dividing his time between his own research and preparation for an undergraduate course he was teaching. He was expecting a call from Johnson. His friend had left Pasadena as he prepared to begin graduate work in quantum information at the University of New Mexico, but he was due back in town that day for their next stunt. Johnson, Cottrell says, had given him $200 to order a couple hundred stickers proclaiming MY SUV SUPPORTS TERRORISM from Cottrelrs mom, who owned a sign shop at the time. Cottrell had sent out e-mails to his Caltech friends, trying to enlist them in a scheme in which they’d slap the stickers on SUVs. As it turned out, the stickers hadn’t arrived in time for Johnson’s visit, but Cottrell was still expecting to hear from him. “I assumed,” Cottrell says, “that he’d want to hang out and do something.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell hardly considered himself an environmental extremist. He knew people who were passionate about what the Earth Liberation Front was doing and others who were against it. He would say he was somewhere in the middle. Actually, he hadn’t concerned himself much with the ecosystem until he got to Caltech, where many students were interested in such things. Researching climate change, Cottrell says, “I came to fear global environmental catastrophe the way I fear death. Perhaps I fear it even more, for whereas death brings merely a cessation to living, the end of civilization would destroy the only context in which human life could have any meaning.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Johnson never did call. At twelve-thirty in the morning, Cottrell went to sleep, only to be roused half an hour later by a knock on the door. It was Johnson and his girlfriend, Michie Oe, who said that they had run out of gas. Cottrell drove them to a service station, where they filled up a detergent bottle with gas, and then to Oe’s car. Somewhere along the way Johnson said that, although he was owed $200 for the absent stickers, he’d erase the debt if Cottrell would come along and spray paint SUVs with them. For their mission they chose Cottrell’s burgundy Toyota. The couple took some shopping bags stuffed with dirty clothes and spray paint cans out of their trunk and dumped them in his. Cottrell, a horrible driver, ceded the wheel to Oe; Johnson rode shotgun, and Cottrell sat in the back.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">At two in the morning, the surveillance camera at the Rusnak Mercedes dealership in Arcadia caught the blurry figures of two young men strolling down a row of midsize luxury SUVs. Every few feet they crouched to deface the inventory with spray paint. Illegible on the footage, their doodles would appear plain enough in the morning light on the fenders, hoods, and doors of eight vehicles: I love POLLUTION, FUCK SUVS, SUV = TERRORISM, and ELF.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">After their first strike, they took a wrong exit on the freeway and wound up in Monrovia, where Johnson suggested they tackle some light trucks on the street. Cottrell says he wasn’t too crazy about messing with private citizens’ SUVs, but that didn’t stop him from joining in. As he was tagging, he heard a window shatter and saw Johnson tossing a flaming bottle into the backseat of a 1998 Ford Expedition. “I was shocked,” Cottrell says. Earlier, he had watched as gas was poured into Oe’s tank, not—as the government would con tend—into empty beer bottles for the making of Molotov cocktails. His friends, he surmised, must have hidden the firebombs underneath the dirty clothes and spray-paint cans in those paper bags. He says he argued with Johnson, who told him he wouldn’t do it again. They were long gone when an MTA security guard named Boston Kareem Fields found his sport utility smoldering at the curb. A burned wick and glass fragments of a Molotov cocktail remained on the charred upholstery of the backseat. POLLUTER was scribbled across the hood. A bright red smiley face and the ELF acronym covered the driver’s side windows. Two other cars were tagged.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">By 3:35 a.m., the trio arrived at the Advantage Ford Lincoln-Mercury dealership in the town of Duarte. They inflicted their damage on 21 SUVs, most of them elephantine Lincoln Navigators and less weighty Aviators, branding them GAS GUZZLER, KILLER, and SMOG MACHINE. They crossed the boulevard to Duarte Mitsubishi, tagging 26 more. Cottrell left a lone personal flourish, which would contribute to his downfall. On the flank of a Mitsubishi Montero he drew a mathematical equation reading [e.sup.i[pi]]+1 = o, which the FBI would identify as the work of 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. It is a mystifying formula in which rational and irrational numbers total exactly zero. The equation, Cottrell says, “just popped into my head.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Clippinger Hummer of West Covina would be their last stop. Cottrell had gone back to environmental sloganeering when he heard more shattering glass. He says he ran over to check on his friend, arriving just in time to see Johnson throw a Molotov at an H2’s windshield. It ricocheted, hit him, and set his clothes on fire. He removed his shirt, losing the blue headband he was wearing in the process.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell can’t say exactly what happened after that. He claims to have left the lot, sequestering himself in the backseat of his car while the worst of the crimes were committed, fie heard more glass breaking, watched the flames, and grew jittery as the neighbors came out to take a look, all the while waiting for Johnson and Oe to climb back over the wall. “Honestly, I was kind of like, well, I didn’t see what they were doing as morally wrong,” he says, “just as dangerous, and likely to get us in trouble.” However strongly he worried about the depredations of global climate change, and the smog-spewing SUVs that contributed so needlessly to it, Cottrell wasn’t about to jeopardize his future in physics. That he couldn’t go to jail for something he didn’t do was axiomatic. “Okay, maybe I’ll get arrested,” he remembers thinking. “Maybe I’ll have to go to trial for this. But I know what I did, and I know that they can’t prove something that didn’t happen. It’s like when you’re doing math. You can’t prove a theorem that’s false. It’s impossible.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell, Johnson, and Oe were on their way home when Ziad Alhassen, a Syrian emigre who is West Covina’s most successful auto dealer and real estate developer, awoke to calamity. News and police helicopters jostling overhead, he rushed down to his Clippinger Hummer lot and ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape. Twenty Hummer H2s had been gut ted. The fire from one of the vehicles had drifted to his parts building and customer lounge, collapsing the roof. Alhassen sloshed around the wreckage in his sandals, dreading the idea that he’d been targeted as an Arab in post-9/11 Los Angeles. Then he spotted ELF on one of his stricken Hummers. I laving heard about the Earth Liberation Front after the group vandalized a dealership on the East Coast, he could assure himself the attack was nothing personal. “It was an ironic relief to me,” he’d say, “that it wasn’t because of my ethnicity.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">One of the dozens of FBI agents combing Alhassen’s lot that morning would recover the blue headband and a few dirty-blond hairs containing Billy Cottrell’s DNA.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">IN OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR, BILLY COTTRELL’S MOTHER, Heidi Schweibert, left the emus and chickens on her farm outside Gainesville, Florida. She rented a bare room in one of Bunker Hill’s bleaker high-rises and fell into a routine of visits with her son at the downtown federal lockup, where he was held without bail pending trial, and consulting with his defense attorneys in Pasadena. She also e-mailed “Free Billy” press releases, hand out shirts silk-screened with her son’s smiling face and the words DON’T WASTE A BEAUTIFUL MIND, and read books about Asperger’s syndrome. A medical expert hired by the defense had diagnosed her son as a sufferer. A high-functioning form of autism, Asperger’s is a neurological disorder that impairs social interaction and language development, and often causes the afflicted to drift into a pedantic monotone about arcane topics. For Cottrell’s mother, Asperger’s is the Rosetta stone. It explains not only his strange behavior that August night but also a lifetime of psychological self-torture and alienation, to say nothing of his compulsion to argue absolutely everything.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“There’s nothing more vicious than a warrior mania,” Schweibert said over lunch at an outdoor restaurant not far from her son’s cell. “And I’ve had to become a warrior for Billy since he was born.” Schweibert mustered a smile beneath a creased brow, her blue eyes clouding up in the sunlight. For more than 20 years she’d been a soldier in her firstborn’s futile fight, bearing more than her share of the wounds.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Billy was a 26-hour labor and came out with a broken shoulder,” Schweibert said. “I think that was probably the easiest day of his life.” Cottrell’s father, Bill, was the hospital’s sole anesthesiologist that day, and although he managed to give his wife an epidural, he was in and out of the delivery room to supervise as other patients were put under. “That sort of symbolizes the whole problem,” Bill Cottrell would explain. “I was torn between my work, being at the time extremely busy; and trying to be a father.” The Cottrells had two more children. Dustin, the middle brother, is a jazz musician and composer. Corey is a dancer who taught herself Portuguese and is in Rio de Janeiro studying martial arts.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Billy was the family’s troubled genius. Though his father has done enough research to believe his son has Asperger’s, he thinks the trauma of the divorce in 1989 accelerated Cottrell’s revolt and his retreat into the intellectual cocoon of math and science. After the separation, Schweibert and her children moved in with her parents in Gainesville, where Cottrell began reassigning blame for his torment. “My problems with the students I merely accepted as a product of their insecurity,” he says, “while my problems with the teachers I took to be a very troubling symptom of a much deeper sickness. Indeed, from a very early age, I have not only blamed my teachers but the school system which hired them, the government which organized that school system, and the society which had elected that government.” Cottrell became convinced that civilization was held together by so many “meaningless conventions which we follow for the convenience of not being punished.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">While Cottrell credits Hamlet and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with informing his sense of himself as an individualist straddling the abyss, his brother offers a more mundane explanation. “When he was n or 12, he started learning ways to win other kids’ favor,” Dustin Cottrell says. “He learned that if he was outrageous and provocative and defied authority, he might get some appreciation, or at least some attention.” When a group of students at his private school published an obscene underground paper, Cottrell alone claimed responsibility. He was expelled. Moving on to a public middle school, he tagged the physical education building, signing his graffiti B.C., which was soon enough identified as “Billy Cottrell.” Having exhausted his options in Florida and his mother’s endurance, he went back to North Carolina. His father put him in a military academy Within a week he was kicked out after demonstrating to a lieutenant that he could dip a dollar in alcohol and burn off the fuel without harming the bill.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">On the advice of an educational consultant, Cottrell was enrolled in a two-week survival program in the mountains of Idaho. Living off the frozen land, campers were supposed to learn the value of depending on others, but the expedition turned into a showcase for Cottrell’s individualism. He built the best rabbit traps, started the quickest fires, hiked the longest without complaint, and was failed for his refusal to embrace teamwork. From there he went to the Provo Canyon School, a for-profit facility for troubled teens, where basic freedoms were to be earned by strict compliance. He remembers being miserable until he got the notion in his head that freedom was a state of mind. “If I can think whatever I want,” he told himself, “no matter what they do to me, I’m still free.” He began whistling and wouldn’t stop, not even after he was ordered to face a wall. He says he spent maybe the next 17 days in forced isolation. Cottrell’s in-house therapist didn’t return calls from Los Angeles to obtain his version of events, and Ken Huey, Provo Canyon’s current director of business development and a former therapist there, says that for reasons of confidentiality, he can’t talk specifically about students. However, he adds, he’s never heard of anyone remaining nearly so long in what he calls the “time-out room”—an enclosure without furniture or even floor tiles, where a student can yell and scream and act out all he wants without hurting himself or anybody else. “I guess I’ve seen kids stay in there for four or five hours.” Nor has Huey heard anything like Cottrell’s account of being overpowered and given a shot that made him paranoid and delusional. Cottrell says he was so scared, he agreed to do anything they demanded, if they would just get him out of there. Whatever their methodology, they had broken him. For the longest time Cottrell couldn’t forgive himself.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The defeat would seem more like a victory to his father and teachers, who would henceforth see more brilliance in Cottrell than anger. “Billy,” his Provo therapist wrote his mother, “is self-motivated to do well—actually compulsive.” He spent his sophomore and junior years at a religious boarding school in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, where he won most of the academic awards. For his senior year, he returned to his mother’s house and took classes at the local high school and the University of Florida at Gainesville. He scored second in the state in Florida’s college-level math exam and twice got perfect scores on the math section of the SATs. “Not that this is an accomplishment,” he would say “It’s geared for a fourth-grade level.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Lacking a high school diploma, his record marred by expulsions and Fs and incompletes but with hints of greater potential than straight-A students, he was accepted into the University of Chicago, which has one of the most rigorous undergraduate programs in the country. Here’s an excerpt from his application letter: “While it is true that I still hold basically the same beliefs that I did as a rebel against the system which sought to destroy freedom and individual thought, I am, in my present situation being offered a wonderful opportunity—hopefully—to explore these goals and I would do anything to make this possible.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">At Chicago, Cottrell met his first serious girlfriend, ran cross-country track, and struck some of his classmates as a genius. “He was way above everyone else I’ve ever met,” says Mike Schmitt, Cottrell’s college roommate, who’s pursuing a medical degree and a biochemistry doctorate at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Something that I worked on three or four hours a day for an entire week, Billy would look at the problem and solve it in his head in five seconds.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell wasn’t entirely through with rebellion. Asked to submit a five-page paper on a particular topic, he turned in a nine-page paper about why he shouldn’t have been asked to write about that topic. “He once told me he wanted not to have either a high school diploma or a college diploma, and then he’d get two Ph.D.s,” Schmitt says. The university thwarted him, though, graduating Cottrell with its top math and science prizes.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“I expected great things from him,” says Peter Freund, professor emeritus of theoretical physics. During Freund’s career heading the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, Cottrell’s paper on p-adic strings was the only undergraduate thesis he supervised. “There is an intangible to becoming a really good researcher,” Freund says. “I mean, you have to be a man of ideas, or a woman of ideas. Nobody has figured how ideas pop in your head and what the process is.” Told about what has become of Cottrell, the professor is dumbfounded. “This man had a career in front of him,” Freund says. “He should have been excited about doing physics at this stage, and he ended up doing this. My gut reaction to everything you’re telling me is that it’s suicide.” <p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">FOUR YEARS AFTER its founding in England in 1992, the ELF began its U.S. operation modestly One fall morning the managers of three Oregon McDonald’s franchises reported to work to find their front doors glued shut and the ELF’s spray-painted signature. An ELF communique posted on the Internet some months after hinted at greater ambitions: “Welcome to the struggle of all species to be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet. The war of greed ravages the earth and species die out every day. The ELF works to speed up the collapse of industry,, scare the rich, and to undermine the foundations of the state. Together, we have teeth and claws to match our dreams.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In its current formlessness, the ELF is a creature of the Internet. It lacks any chain of command, has no avowed leaders or even a post office box. It may be made up of dedicated cells, or not. Its adherents commit acts in its name the way pro-life extremists invoke the Almighty. Bron Taylor, a professor of religion at the University of Florida at Gainesville who has had contact with ELF activists, speculates that most ELF crimes have been carried out by a few dozen disciplined and committed individuals. “I think the tendency of observers is to get a very skewed view of who’s doing this,” Taylor says, “because they’re focusing their attention on who’s caught, and those who are caught would be the most cavalier about it, and the most impulsive.” In 2001, three Long Island teenagers pleaded guilty to setting some half-built local luxury homes on fire. They testified against the alleged ringleader at the first ELF case ever to make it into a federal courtroom, but he was acquitted.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Unlike the radical leftist Weather Underground, who robbed a Brinks truck with guns blazing, or survivalist patriots of the Timothy McVeigh stripe, who can justify exploding a truck bomb at a day care center because it happens to share space with a federal office building—and unlike Al Qaeda—the Earth Liberation Front denounces violence against all biological life in furtherance of its aims. So far the group has managed to wreak its havoc without causing death or great bodily harm. The FBI doesn’t recognize such distinctions. “I think it can be seen as nothing but disingenuous that you’re not going to endanger lives but you’re going to burn things down,” says Randy Parsons, special agent in charge of the L.A. bureau’s counterterrorism division. “Nobody can control where fire goes.” During congressional testimony four months after 9/11, James Jarboe, domestic section chief of the bureau’s counterterrorism division, reported that the ELF had emerged as “a serious terrorist threat.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">At $2.3 million, the damage caused by the Hummer arsons wasn’t overwhelming by ELF standards. In October of 1998, Vail Resorts Inc. of Colorado began expanding its ski complex onto land inhabited by the endangered Canadian lynx. Seven ELF fires broke out simultaneously, causing $12 million in damage. The most catastrophic ELF crime was pulled off in San Diego three weeks before the SUV fires, when activists burned down a condominium complex under construction—a $50 million loss. But the sight of H2s ablaze in the summer of 2003 was more symbolically loaded. That spring Arianna Huffington and a handful of Hollywood insiders had cosponsored commercials taking SUV owners to task for propping up Middle East oil regimes. As a candidate in the California gubernatorial recall race, Huffington was about to make the low fuel efficiency of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hummer fleet a campaign issue. In the debate over high-emission SUVs, the Hummer—the largest vehicle in its class—was paraded out as the most egregious example.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">On the morning of August 22, the ELF Web site posted a photo of the Clippinger wreckage above the slogan EVERY NIGHT IS EARTH NIGHT! Cottrell saw it and learned how wildly the Hummer fires had raged out of control. The day’s L.A. Times reported that the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had joined the investigation, and that federal prosecutors were already invoking possible life terms for the perpetrators.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Around 9:30 a.m., Cottrell got a call from Jesse Bloom, who ran cross-country with him at Chicago and was now studying chemistry at Caltech. Bloom had decided not to join Cottrell’s anti-SUV bumper-stickering campaign, but he knew it had been scheduled for the previous night and was curious to know if Cottrell had gone through with it. “He said the bumper stickers hadn’t come,” Bloom would testify. “He was very nervous, and I asked if he had vandalized cars instead. He said, ‘I guess you could call it that.’ He said they had destroyed Hummers.” Cottrell denies getting that specific with Bloom. He says he shared his most detailed postmortem with Bloom’s ex-girlfriend, Claire Jacobs, another Caltech grad student he’d known at Chicago. She would testify at his trial that Cottrell had called up to see if she’d been alone the night before. When she told him no, Cottrell said that it was “too bad,” because he needed an alibi. Later that day, at Caltech’s Fairchild Library, Cottrell led Jacobs to a computer whose screen showed the half-collapsed parts build ing at Clippinger Hummer. “He said, ‘I can’t believe it got this big,'” Jacobs testified. “‘I can’t believe this happened.’ I assumed he meant the fire in the building.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">A week or two after the arsons, Cottrell joined Bloom and a few other friends for a jog through Griffith Park. Cottrell announced that the bumper stickers had finally arrived and that he was rescheduling his campaign for the night of September 10. That way, on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, the sport utility owners would wake up to read MY suv SUPPORTS TERRORISM on their fenders. “I was pretty floored by how stupid it seemed,” Bloom recalls. “I tried to talk him out of it.” Cottrell believed that after e-mailing his friends about the bumper stickering, it would look more suspicious for him not to go through with it. Besides, he just didn’t see how anyone could make a connection between what he had already done and what he was about to do. Cottrell was deterred only when he returned home for a closer look at the stickers mad realized they said MY SUV SUPPORTS TERRIORISM. The spelling error was too embarrassing. <p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">On September 12, the FBI apprehended a suspect, Josh Connole, a 26-year-old peace activist. A gangly vegetarian solar-panel salesman, Connole drove an electric vehicle and lived at a commune in Pomona. He was also in possession of a sign that proclaimed GEORGE BUSH IS A NAZI FASCIST CORPORATE PIG, which he says “is all true, except for the pig part.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Reading about the arrest in the L.A. Times, Cottrell says he called up Johnson, insisting that they issue an anonymous statement to exonerate Connole. The first e-mail—sent by a fictitious Tony Marsden through a Web-based account—reached L.A. Times reporter Jessica Garrison a couple of hours alter Connole was freed. “Hello,” the writer said. “The police have the wrong man here. I was amongst those responsible for the SUV attacks.” He mentioned Euler’s theorem to prove his bona fides, a detail that wasn’t yet public information, and criticized the reds’ shabby work. “We left plenty of clues, none of them pointing to Josh. The FBI hasn’t seemed to pick up on any of them, which makes the whole ordeal very boring for us, the true culprits.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell would admit to sending just one of the e-mails, suggesting a complex scenario in which Johnson might have sent others from a Caltech library computer via remote access. Cottrell wasn’t going to waste his time driving to an Internet cafe or somewhere else off-campus to correspond with the newspaper. If investigators had gone so far afield as to arrest Josh Connole, he didn’t know what he should be so worried about. “I think I was being very lazy and overly confident,” Cottrell says. “The FBI seemed like a bunch of idiots to me.” Besides, he believed that the Times couldn’t contribute to his unmasking. “You hear all these things about these chivalrous press agents who keep their sources secret under torture,” Cottrell says.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In a follow-up article, the Times reported the results of an in-house analysis: The Marsden e-mails had been sent from computers at Caltech and Pasadena City College. “The Times,” the article stated, “notified the schools.” The systems administrator for Caltech’s libraries contacted the head of campus security. By late September federal agents had seized the computers at Fairchild Library, and forensic investigators found a ghost of the Marsden e-mails in the cache of one terminal, sent soon after Billy Cottrell had checked his messages there.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In January, federal investigators returned to Caltech to question Cottrell and his friends. While interrogating Claire Jacobs, FBI agents told her that President Bush himself was interested in the outcome of this case, and that FBI director Robert Mueller was, for a time, briefed on it every day After admitting that she’d told Cottrell to dispose of some evidence, Jacobs chose to cooperate under a grant of immunity. Bloom also began talking to the FBI while urging Cottrell to inform on Johnson. On a trip the three took together earlier in the summer, Bloom had listened as Johnson talked about environmentally motivated arson. Bloom didn’t consider Cottrell a mild progressive, let ,alone an extremist. Cottrell was a booster of Schwarzenegger’s campaign and didn’t seem to like unions much. Besides, he was incapable of keeping his mouth shut. “I certainly don’t think that Billy was the mastermind,” Bloom says. “This whole thing seems to require more quiet planning than I think Billy was capable of.” One of Johnson’s friends suspects the opposite. “Billy was a grad student,” this friend says. “He knew more math than Tyler. He knew more physics and was better at climbing rocks. I don’t think Tyler himself was a driving force behind any of this.” As for Cottrell, federal agents told him that he’d broken the cardinal rule of crime by blabbing about it. Nevertheless, they said, what they really wanted was to get the other guys. Cottrell replied that even if he was involved, he’d in no way implicate anyone else who was.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In early February, about a week after that interview, Johnson notified his fellow physics students at the University of New Mexico that his lather had had a stroke and he would be taking a leave of absence. Later they heard that Johnson’s father was in fine health and Johnson had fled the country. Oe, too, had vanished. She left be hind a note in her San Fernando Valley apartment for her three best friends: ALWIN, AKIRA AND MIKE. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. PLEASE HATE ME—MICHIE.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">IN THE SPRING of 2004, John E. Lewis, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, reported to the Senate Judiciary Committee that progress had been made in the battle against ecoterrorism, with the apprehension of an “accused ELI: arsonist.” “William Cottrell,” he informed its chairman, Senator Orrin Hatch, “was arrested by the FBI’s Los Angeles Division on March 9, 2004, and indicted by a federal grand jury on March 16, 2004, for the role he played in a series of arsons and vandalism of more than 120 sport utility vehicles.” The charges against Cottrell included eight counts of arson and arson conspiracy for torching the Hummers, which would give him a concurrent sentence of 5 to 19 years. He was also charged with use of a destructive device during the commission of a felony in connection with the firebombing of Boston Fields’s Ford Expedition, the sole vehicle in which a Molotov cocktail had survived as evidence. The ninth count would yield an additional 30 years to life.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The decade before Cottrell’s indictment, the Southern district of the U.S. Attorney’s office, which stretches from Los Angeles to Riverside to San Diego, had pursued just two arson prosecutions. Only because the H2s were manufactured in Indiana and transported for sale in California did the federal government have jurisdiction under interstate commerce law.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">To bring Cottrell to justice, the United States enlisted three prosecutors from its counterterrorism and organized crime divisions, and a Joint Terrorism Task Force spear headed by the FBI. Cottrell’s attorneys, Marvin Rudnick and Michael Mayock, crafted their defense around Asperger’s syndrome. Both their own expert and the prosecution’s concluded that Cottrell had some symptoms of the disease. Cottrell alone was skeptical of the diagnosis. “I distrust most psychologists, and I think that labeling people does no good,” he says. “As to whether or not I actually have Asperger’s, my attitude is that if a bunch of psychologists make up a word, then I guess they have the right to apply it however they wish.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Asperger’s was at the core of Mayock’s opening statement to the jury last November. The defense lawyer likened his client’s brain to “a slow computer” with a dial-up Internet connection when it came to assessing the motives of his so-called friends,Johnson and Oe, that night. “Because he has Asperget’s, he was an easy dupe,” Mayock said. “Because he has Asperger’s, he actually became a victim in this case.” Mayock also made clear that whatever Cottrell’s mental condition, he had stopped short of committing arson—omitting that under federal conspiracy statutes, Cottrell could be found just as guilty as if he had.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Only when the prosecution was well on its way to resting its case did U.S. district judge Gary Klausner hand down his ruling that Asperger’s would be inadmissible. The decision gutted the defense. Without Asperger’s, Cottrell hardly seemed credible when he testified to taking Johnson at his word that, having set one SUV on fire, his friend was sorry, and wouldn’t do it again. He was a disastrous witness, fidgeting nonstop on the stand, his attitude toward judge, jury,, even his own attorneys, superior, aloof, and—classic Asperger’s?—pedantic.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Yes, he testified, he was the one who wrote Euler’s theorem on the Montero. “I think I’ve known Euler’s theorem since I was five,” he added. “Everyone should know Euler’s theorem.” In vain did he try to explain to the court his academic specialty.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“String theory,” the judge clarified. “It’s an area of physics.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“It’s the area of physics,” Cottrell corrected him.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Riordan rose to give the government’s closing argument. “This is not a popularity contest,” he said, “nor is it a political arena in any way. The politics in this case do not exist.” Nor, he told the jury should Cottrell receive any favorable treatment or sympathy, even if he was a whiz at math. “He has to be treated no differently than you’d treat a homeboy on trial,” Riordan said. “You treat them the same.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">The prosecution had introduced no testimony or physical evidence that placed a firebomb in Cottrell’s hand. But that didn’t mean the defendant wasn’t himself dangerously flammable. “Mr. Cottrell’s volatile mix,” Riordan said, “isn’t that different from a Molotov cocktail—a dripping contempt for authority. A self-belief over all others.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">That evening the jury agreed that Cottrell was guilty of all the arsons. The next morning it decided to acquit him of the charge of using the explosive device. One of the jurors would say that, giving Cottrell every benefit of the doubt, a few of them reasoned that he did not become a knowing member of an arson conspiracy until after that first Molotov was launched.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Immaterial to the prosecution’s case was any determination as to whether Cottrell was an Earth Liberation Front terrorist. Jason De Bretteville, another of Cottrell’s prosecutors, says that neither he nor his colleagues discussed it. “Certainly, it was an ELF investigation,” he says of the case, “but the trial was about an arson committed by Billy Cottrell. ELF was not charged in the indictment.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In Judge Klausner’s courtroom Cottrell may have been regarded as just another defendant, but powerful outside forces had singled him out for the kind of extraordinary investigation and prosecution that few other accused arsonists will ever have to face. There was the ELF’s eight-year war against the despoilers of the environment; the federal government’s war against the ELF which after 9/11 became a war against terror; and Cottrell’s own hopeless war that began with his teachers, then expanded to include the school system that hired them, the government that organized that system, and the society that supported that government.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">IN THE VISITATION cubicle at the San Bernardino jail, Cottrell is reeling from sleeplessness and a case of the flu, but his mind is limber as he debates the merit of taking extreme action. “You can’t say it is always wrong to use quote-unquote violence for political ends,” he says. “I mean, if you apply that rule to Nazi Germany, you would say, ‘Okay, let’s let things go their way.’ We wouldn’t have had the Boston Tea Party or the American Revolution.” Notwithstanding his conviction, Cottrell believes the ultimate verdict on his actions will be handed down when humanity finally discovers whether global warming is going to destroy the earth. “If there’s the worst-case disaster scenario that some scientists say is likely to occur, people might look back and say, ‘Oh, more people should have been doing that.’ Then again, if there’s no environmental catastrophe, and all of a sudden the polar ice caps start rebuilding themselves, they’ll say, ‘Oh, he was crazy.'”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Cottrell revisits the many blunders he made in the days following the arsons. He struggles to explain why he just didn’t take a half an hour to dart off campus and send those L.A. Times e-mails from someplace where he couldn’t be so easily detected. All he can say is that he saw the entire business as a distraction from his main focus, theoretical physics. “You know,” Cottrell says, “as stupid as it sounds, because I’m going to spend five years in here or whatever, I just thought it would be quicker to send it from Caltech so I could get back to the work I was doing.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Maybe he didn’t want to get back to what he was doing. After the school-yard beatings, after the expulsions, reform school, and physical and psychological deprivation, after suffering through a youth in which his genius hung on him like a hair shirt, Cottrell had, incredibly, achieved the goal he set out for himself when he picked up Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in elementary school. At Caltech he had a chance to become one of the great physicists of his generation. Having somehow leaped onto firm ground, his future secure, perhaps he was more uncomfortable than when he had straddled the abyss.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“There’s something I think that’s scary about being in a situation where you know exactly what the rest of your life is going to be like,” Billy Cottrell says. “Because at that point, your life becomes meaningless. There’s nothing left to do or conquer—when all of a sudden, it’s going to be so easy.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Illustration by Ralph Steadman <p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height" margin-top="margin-top" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">ALSO: Read Postscript: <a href="http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1335126" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">The Accidental Ecoterrorist</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell</a>william Jensen "Billy" Cottrell (born 1980) is a former <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph.D.candidate" class="mw-redirect" title="Ph.D. candidate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Ph.D. candidate</a> at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_Technology" title="California Institute of Technology" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">California Institute of Technology</a> who was convicted in April 2005 of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy(crime)" class="mw-redirect" title="Conspiracy (crime)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">conspiracy</a> associated with the destruction of eight <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_utility_vehicle" title="Sport utility vehicle" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">sport utility vehicles</a> and a Hummer dealership in the name of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front" title="Earth Liberation Front" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Earth Liberation Front</a> (ELF). He was sentenced to eight years in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prison" title="Federal prison" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">federal prison</a> on conspiracy charges and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution. His lawyers, however, have appealed the verdict and sentence. He was released August 16, 2011.<div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" style="direction: ltr; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-size: 14px;"><div class="mw-parser-output" style=""><div id="toc" class="toc" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="mw-toc-heading" style="background-color: rgb(248, 249, 250); border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 7px; font-size: 13.3px; display: table;"><input type="checkbox" role="button" id="toctogglecheckbox" class="toctogglecheckbox" style="direction: ltr; position: absolute; opacity: 0; z-index: -1; display: none;" /><div class="toctitle" lang="en" dir="ltr" style="text-align: center; direction: ltr;">
</div><ul style="list-style-image: none; margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Early_life" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1Early life</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Summer_2003_and_SUV_arsons" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">2Summer 2003 and SUV arsons</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Trial" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">3Trial</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Imprisonment" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">4Imprisonment</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Documentary_film" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">5Documentary film</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#Decision_by_the_U.S.Court_of_Appeals_Ninth_Circuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">6Decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#References" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">7References</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Early life[</h2>Cottrell graduated from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago" title="University of Chicago" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Chicago</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[1]</a> After graduating, he was accepted to the graduate physics program at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltech" class="mw-redirect" title="Caltech" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Caltech</a>, where he would meet Tyler Johnson, who was also studying physics and finishing up his undergraduate work.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[2]</a><h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Summer 2003 and SUV arsons[</h2>In August 2003, Cottrell and Tyler Johnson developed a plan to place bumper stickers on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_utility_vehicle" title="Sport utility vehicle" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">SUVs</a> reading "SUV = TERRORISM."<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-laweekly-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[3]</a> In a series of emails that were later recovered by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation" title="Federal Bureau of Investigation" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">FBI</a>, Cottrell attempted to recruit friends to help him purchase the bumper stickers, and organised arson attacks on a series of Hummer dealers.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>]<h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Trial[</h2>He was arrested in March 2004 after law enforcement tracked him sending emails to the Los Angeles Times. The e-mails signed by "Tony Marsden" speak about what the ELF cell had done, vandalizing more than 130 SUVs parked at dealerships or residential homes, claiming they were damaging the environment.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[4]</a> He was charged with conspiracy to commit arson, arson, and one count of using a destructive device during a crime of violence, in an October 24, 2004 Federal grand jury indictment.[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">citation needed</a>] Cottrell's lawyers stated that he was diagnosed with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome" title="Asperger syndrome" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Asperger syndrome</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-:0-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[5]</a> However, Judge Gary Klausner would not allow a defense based upon the claim that Cottrell was suffering from Asperger syndrome.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-:0-5" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[5]</a>At his trial, Cottrell admitted being present, but denied involvement in throwing Molotov cocktails, saying Johnson was the mastermind.An informal network of Cottrell supporters formed, led by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front" title="Earth Liberation Front" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Earth Liberation Front</a> Prisoner's Network and the Free Billy Cottrell organization. These supporters claimed that Cottrell was the innocent victim of government persecution. However, when Cottrell named Johnson as the mastermind, it prompted his Free Billy Cottrell supporters to brand him as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason" title="Treason" style="background: none; text-decoration-line: none;">traitor</a>, issue an apology to those who supported Cottrell,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[6]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[7]</a> and end all support.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[8]</a><h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Imprisonment[</h2>An article in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LA_Weekly" title="LA Weekly" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">LA Weekly</a> reports that Billy was being mistreated by prison guards who have labeled him a "terrorist". According to the article, he is not permitted to study physics or Mandarin Chinese, is not permitted to teach the other prisoners calculus, and had had his books and papers removed without being given a reason.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-laweekly-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[3]</a>A letter in Cottrell's defense, signed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking" title="Stephen Hawking" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Stephen Hawking</a> and other prominent scientists, was distributed to prison authorities and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at Cottrell's October 18, 2006 hearing.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-laweekly-3" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[3]</a> He was then transferred into another federal prison with less violent prisoners.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-9" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[9]</a> Cottrell was then able to study subjects that he was denied at the last prison and no longer had a roommate.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-10" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[10]</a><h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Documentary film[</h2>A documentary film on Cottrell, titled Standard Deviation, was written and directed by David Randag and Chris Brannan in 2008.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-11" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[11]</a> In 2009, it won the Emmy for best student documentary at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's 30th College Television Awards.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-12" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">[12]</a><h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">Decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit[</h2>On 8 September 2009, Cottrell's convictions and sentences for arson were overturned by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Ninth_Circuit" title="United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-13" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[13]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_note-LATimes2009-14" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">[14]</a> However, the conspiracy conviction and sentence were affirmed. According to the Times, the omission of Cottrell's diagnosis of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome" title="Asperger syndrome" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Asperger syndrome</a> during his 2004 trial played a key role in the decision. Cottrell was released on August 16, 2011.<h2 style="background: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); font-family: " linux="Linux" libertine="Libertine" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" serif="serif" line-height="line-height">References[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Cottrell&action=edit&section=7&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro" title="Edit section: References" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><div class="reflist columns references-column-width" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 12.6px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.3em; column-width: 30em; list-style-type: decimal;"><ol class="references" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-parent 0 list-item 0; list-style-type: inherit;"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-1" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=EF4EAAAAMBAJ&dq=" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">Los Angeles Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 5, May 2005</a>, Emmis Communications, p. 198: "During <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Freund" title="Peter Freund" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Freund's</a> career heading the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, Cottrell's paper on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_strings" class="mw-redirect" title="P-adic strings" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">p-adic strings</a>was the only undregraduate thesis he supervised."</li><li id="cite_note-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-2" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<cite class="citation web" style="font-style: inherit; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090107024035/http://www.vincebeiser.com/hummer.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">"Burned"</a>. April 10, 2005. Archived from <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.vincebeiser.com/hummer.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">the original</a> on January 7, 2009.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=unknown&rft.btitle=Burned&rft.date=2005-04-10&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vincebeiser.com%2Fhummer.html&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWilliam+Cottrell" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-laweekly-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;">^ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-laweekly_3-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-laweekly_3-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">b</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-laweekly_3-2" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">c</a> <cite class="citation web" style="font-style: inherit; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Lewis, Judith (February 28, 2007). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070304065152/http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/a-terrible-thing-to-waste/15782/?page=1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">"A terrible thing to waste"</a>. Archived from <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/a-terrible-thing-to-waste/15782/?page=1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">the original</a> on March 4, 2007.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=unknown&rft.btitle=A+terrible+thing+to+waste&rft.date=2007-02-28&rft.aulast=Lewis&rft.aufirst=Judith&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.laweekly.com%2Fgeneral%2Ffeatures%2Fa-terrible-thing-to-waste%2F15782%2F%3Fpage%3D1&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWilliam+Cottrell" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-4" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<cite class="citation news" style="font-style: inherit; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040402024314/http://www.cdfe.org/suv_suspect_arrested.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">"Earth Liberation Front suspect charged in California SUV arson, vandalism raids"</a>. Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. March 18, 2004. Archived from <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.cdfe.org/suv_suspect_arrested.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">the original</a> on April 2, 2004.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Earth+Liberation+Front+suspect+charged+in+California+SUV+arson%2C+vandalism+raids&rft.date=2004-03-18&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdfe.org%2Fsuv_suspect_arrested.htm&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWilliam+Cottrell" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-:0-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;">^ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-:0_5-0" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="user-select: none; top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up to:a</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-:0_5-1" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">b</a> <cite class="citation web" style="font-style: inherit; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.aspires-relationships.com/articles_billy_cottrell_innocent_guilty_or_duped.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">"Billy Cottrell - Innocent, Guilty or Duped?"</a>. Aspires-relationships.com. Retrieved 2015-08-26.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=unknown&rft.btitle=Billy+Cottrell+-+Innocent%2C+Guilty+or+Duped%3F&rft.pub=Aspires-relationships.com&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aspires-relationships.com%2Farticles_billy_cottrell_innocent_guilty_or_duped.htm&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWilliam+Cottrell" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-6" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.infoshop.org/inews/comment.php?mode=view&cid=84436" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word">http://www.infoshop.org/inews/comment.php?mode=view&cid=84436</a></li><li id="cite_note-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-7" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.cdfe.org/cottrell_convicted.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" break-word="break-word">http://www.cdfe.org/cottrell_convicted.htm</a></li><li id="cite_note-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; counter-increment: mw-ref-extends-parent 1; counter-reset: mw-ref-extends-child 0; break-inside: avoid-column;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cottrell#cite_ref-8" aria-label="Jump up" title="Jump up" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">^{</a> }<cite class="citation web" style="font-style: inherit; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://brianoconnor.typepad.com/animal_crackers/2005/04/william_cottrel.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) right center no-repeat, url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" skins.vector.styles="skins.vector.styles" images="images" external-link-ltr-icon.svg="external-link-ltr-icon.svg" b4b84="b4b84" padding-right="padding-right" px="px">"Animal Crackers: William Cottrell: An Unremorseful Soul on the Eve of Sentencing"</a>. Brianoconnor.typepad.com. 2005-04-11. 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padding: 0px; display: inline;"><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 0px; padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.25em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1980_births" title="Category:1980 births" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">1980 births</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_arsonists" title="Category:American arsonists" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American arsonists</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_people_imprisoned_on_charges_of_terrorism" title="Category:American people imprisoned on charges of terrorism" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American people imprisoned on charges of terrorism</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_prisoners_and_detainees" title="Category:American prisoners and detainees" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">American prisoners and detainees</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Earth_Liberation_Front" title="Category:Earth Liberation Front" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Earth Liberation Front</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people" title="Category:Living people" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Living people</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Concord,_North_Carolina" title="Category:People from Concord, North Carolina" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">People from Concord, North Carolina</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_with_Asperger_syndrome" title="Category:People with Asperger syndrome" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">People with Asperger syndrome</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisoners_and_detainees_of_the_United_States_federal_government" title="Category:Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Ninth_Circuit_cases" title="Category:United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cases" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cases</a></li><li style="margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); padding: 0px 0.5em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:University_of_Chicago_alumni" title="Category:University of Chicago alumni" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none;">University of Chicago alumni</a></li></ul></div></div>William Jensen "Billy" Cottrell (born 1980) is a former Ph. D. candidate at the California Institute of Technology who was convicted in April 2005 of conspiracy associated with the destruction of eight sport utility vehicles and a Hummer dealership in the name of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).Education: The University of Chicago, California ...Born: 1980
William Cottrell - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › William_CottrellFeedbackAbout Featured SnippetsWeb results
Radicals Target SUVs in Series of Southland Attacks - Los ...www.latimes.com › la-xpm-2003-aug-23-me-hummers23-storyAug 23, 2003 - The ELF also claimed responsibility recently for a $50-million arson fire that ... new cars, mostly H2 Hummers, the civilian version of the military Humvee. ... including an arson attack on a dealership in Erie, Pa., in January, that ...
Cries of Activism and Terrorism in S.U.V. Torching - The New ...www.nytimes.com › 2003/08/31 › cries-of-activism-and-terrorism-in-su...Aug 31, 2003 - Twenty new Hummer H2's worth about $50000 apiece are set aflame and destroyed at car dealership in West Covina, Calif, part of wave of ... group also claims responsibility for $50 million fire on Aug 1 that destroyed construction site for ... A banner left at the site, signed ELF, said, ''You build it -- we burn it.
Arrest In SUVs Firebombing - CBS Newswww.cbsnews.com › news › arrest-in-suvs-firebombingSep 19, 2003 - Environmental Activist Allegedly Destroyed 20 Hummers. ... arson fires and vandalism that did $1 million in damage to a Hummer dealership. ... He was booked for investigation of felony arson and vandalism and jailed $825,000 bail. ... claimed in an unsigned e-mail that the SUV fires were "ELF actions.".
Arsonists Hit SUV Dealerships - The Washington Postwww.washingtonpost.com › archive › politics › 2003/08/23 › arsonists-...Aug 23, 2003 - Several apparent arson fires ripped through a car dealership, damaging or destroying dozens of Hummers and other SUVs, and dozens of other vehicles were ... The initials ELF appeared on several of the vehicles. "The initial ...
SUVs burned in extremist attack - News* - recordnet.com ...www.recordnet.com › article › A_NEWSAug 23, 2003 - ELF's news office said it appeared that the San Diego-area fire was ... keeps watch Friday at an auto dealership, which sold Hummer and ...
Elf strikes again, torches Hummer dealer - UPI.comwww.upi.com › Elf-strikes-again-torches-Hummer-dealerAug 22, 2003 - Suspected radical environmentalists struck Friday at four Los Angeles-area auto lots, including one where fire caused serious damage.
ELF strikes again ...www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk › ~pel › environment › elf1Apparent arson fires destroyed or damaged dozens of Hummers and other SUVs early today at a car dealership vandalized by anti-pollution graffiti, and similar ...
FBI charges grad student with dealership arsonwww.autonews.com › article › SUB › fbi-charges-grad-student-with-d...Mar 11, 2004 - FBI charges grad student with dealership arson ... Hardest hit was Clippinger Chevrolet-Hummer in West Covina, Calif., where 72 ... of the vehicles were defaced with the letters “ELF,” and words such as “SUVs equal pollution.
The Accidental Ecoterrorist Los Angeles Magazinewww.lamag.com › UncategorizedMay 1, 2005 - As he faced arson, conspiracy, and weapons charges, Cottrell denied ... Then he spotted ELF on one of his stricken Hummers. I laving heard about the Earth Liberation Front after the group vandalized a dealership on the East ...=</td></tr></tbody></table>