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This image provide by firefighter Mark Mobley shows the Two Elks Restaurant burning on Vail Mountain, Colo., Oct. 19, 1998.
(AP/Mark Mobley)
Rebecca Rubin
Nearly 12 years after her last arson, Canadian eco-saboteur Rebecca Rubin will stand before a federal judge in Portland on Thursday to plead guilty for her role in a conspiracy to commit a multistate firebombing spree.
Rubin, now 40, was a fugitive from December 2005 to last November, when her mother drove her from Vancouver, B.C., to the U.S. border at Blaine, Wash. There she turned herself over to the FBI, acknowledging her role as a saboteur for the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front.
The underground groups acted, they claimed in anonymous communiques, to protect animals and the environment from logging, overdevelopment and what they described as the pillaging of natural resources for profit.
FBI officials characterized the two underground groups – better known as ELF and ALF – as the nation's leading domestic terrorist threat.
According to government court papers, Rubin took part in a cluster of underground cells collectively known as The Family, which took oaths of secrecy, scouted targets, took dry runs and struck time after time in five states, sometimes using a signature firebomb called the Cat's Cradle.
U.S. prosecutors in California and Colorado recently transferred felony indictments against Rubin to Oregon, where she will face all her criminal charges. The date of her sentencing is likely to be set when she appears Thursday before Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken.
It is unclear how much prison time Rubin will be ordered to serve. But she faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison on the arson charges.
Rubin's apparent entry as a saboteur began on Nov. 30, 1997, when the government says she took part in freeing 400 wild horses from a U.S. Bureau of Land management corral, then setting fire to a barn, pens and horse chutes.
The ALF and ELF claimed joint responsibility for the fire, which caused nearly $500,000 in damages.
Rubin played a minor role the following year by carrying gasoline onto a snowy mountain in Vail, Colo., government prosecutors say. The fuel was used on Oct. 19, 1998, to ignite what became the costliest act of eco-sabotage in U.S. history – a $12 million conflagration that consumed a ski lodge and other buildings and equipment under construction.
The ELF passed a communique to news media stating the fire was intended to deter development of pristine wilderness and save the Canada lynx.
Rubin then took part in an Earth Liberation Front cell's attempt to burn down the Medford office of U.S. Forest Industries on Dec. 22, 1998, according to court papers. She was not with her compatriots five days later when they set fire to the building, causing $700,000 in damages.
Nearly three years passed before Rubin's last fire, on Oct. 15, 2001, when she and others set fire to a BLM horse and burro corral at Litchfield, Calif., prosecutors allege. The fire destroyed a barn and 250 tons of hay, with losses topping $85,000.
The torching of a government facility just 34 days after the 9-11 stunned Americans still coming to grips with the deadliest day of terrorism on U.S. soil.
The Earth Liberation Front signaled in a claim of responsibility that it wasn't going to let up: "In the name of all that is wild we will continue to target industries and organizations that seek to profit by destroying the Earth."
For the next few years, cells of Earth Liberation Front saboteurs rampaged across the U.S.
The front's crowning act came in August 2003, in what became known as the Summer of Fire, when its saboteurs committed the most destructive act of eco-sabotage in U.S. history. They burned down a massive condo complex under construction in San Diego, Calif., leaving a sheet on the ground near the ruins.
"If you build it," the makeshift sign read, "we will burn it. The E.L.F.s are mad."
Two years would pass before the government indicted a slew of ELF and ALF saboteurs, including Rubin, for their roles in an estimated $23 million in sabotage from 1996 to 2001 in Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado and Wyoming.
A pair of Rubin's accused co-conspirators, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee and Josephine Sunshine Overaker, remain fugitives.
-- Bryan Denson