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News Link Police State
Viper Team militia informant risks life to reclaim identity
05-27-2012
www.ctsurv.com
Viper Team militia informant risks life to reclaim identity
By Lou Michel
Pappy
Andrews wants his identity back. He gave it up more than a decade ago
after helping federal agents break up a right-wing militia in Phoenix.
Because he had put his life on the line and there were fears the militia
or its friends might harm him, the federal government gave him a new
identity.
But now, Andrews, 49, is tired of hiding and wants his old life back.
Ive
done nothing illegal, and Ive lost more than 13 years. Im so far
below zero that a newly arriving immigrant has more rights than me,
Andrews said. I walked away from my children in order to keep them
safe. The militia movement and its friends have a code for dealing with
spies: kill them.
Patrick Pappy Andrews is the name he took while on the run.
He landed in this area a year or two ago, met a local woman and got married. Now, he wants to settle down.
But
to do that, he says, he needs the government to fix an inadequate
identity it provided to him years ago. Then, he can create a normal life
for himself.
The faulty government identity prevents him from
voting, registering a car or filing tax returns. Even more upsetting, he
says, is the time he lost contact with his three children after he left
them behind to protect them from threats he was receiving.
For
all of those reasons, he is doing what most people with a death threat
hanging over their heads would never consider: He is publicly revisiting
his old identity in the hopes of moving on with his life.
Andrews
says he feels he has no choice but to go public, because years of
desperate letters and phone calls to federal officials have gotten him
nowhere. Government documents and old news stories on the operation that
fill a folder appear to support his claims.
Yet he acknowledges
that going public is a risk, because the dozen Viper Team militia
members he helped put behind bars have served their prison terms.
If
the government fails him again, he says, he is willing to give up his
low-key life here and move on, because its hard to hit a moving
target.
In 1995, the man once known as Drew Nolan was managing a
Phoenix gun store, one of the biggest in the Southwest, and was in a
position to get acquainted with militia members.
His job brought
him into daily contact with all kinds of people, law-abiding citizens
and others angry at the federal government for its failures at Waco and
Ruby Ridge, where citizens died in mishandled law enforcement
operations.
In retaliation, the government suffered a major blow
from the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, where
Pendleton native Timothy J. McVeigh killed 168 people.
So when
agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
asked for Andrews help to infiltrate the Viper Team militia, he
agreed.
It was the right thing to do, he said.
With
his help, the agents arrested 12 Vipers and confiscated more than 2,000
pounds of explosives and truckloads of guns and ammunition.
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