FBI used felon to infiltrate BLM

0utsyder

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I feel like we have all seen this story before. Fred Hampton with the Black Panthers. Martin Luther King, etc... But they got the result they wanted a lot of those protest groups don't trust anyone anymore and won't organize out of fear of being basically entrapped. Always be leery of people that like to call other people feds or snitches!


THE SNITCH IN THE SILVER HEARSE
The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement
BECOME A MEMBER
Illustration: Clay Rodery for The Intercept
Trevor Aaronson
February 7 2023, 12:54 p.m.

AS RACIAL JUSTICE PROTESTS broke out nationwide in the summer of 2020, a man driving a silver hearse became a regular at the demonstrations in Denver.
He was a paunchy 5-foot-7 with a ruddy complexion and wore military fatigues with patches on the sleeves. By activist standards, he was an old-timer: pushing 50 as he swaggered through crowds of teens and 20-something protesters, a cigar clamped in his lips.
“I didn’t know much about him, but he drove a hearse,” said Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, a Black activist in Denver. “Inside this hearse was a lot of guns: AR-15s and all other kinds of shit.”
The driver of the hearse filled with guns was Michael Adam Windecker II. He went by the nickname Mickey and boasted of having been a soldier for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force known most recently for battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He claimed to have traveled to those battlefields and trained antifascist activists there in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and explosives.
“He was just this badass dude talking about how he worked in a foreign military and how he was for the Black Lives Matter movement,” Hall remembered.
Denver was a hot spot during the summer of 2020, with protesters enraged not just by George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis but also by the senseless death of Elijah McClain, who was forcefully subdued by police in 2019 in Aurora, a Denver suburb, and injected with a lethal dose of ketamine.

Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.
“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”
Bryce Shelby, another Black activist, remembered seeing Windecker walking around the protests. He had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest, which Shelby initially thought was suspicious. “He de-escalated any type of suspicion because he would start flashing his prison badge,” Shelby said. “So yeah. You know what I mean? OK, he’s not a fed.”
But Shelby and many other activists in Denver were wrong about the man behind the wheel of the silver hearse. Windecker was a fed. The FBI paid him tens of thousands of dollars in cash to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

For the last year, I’ve been investigating Windecker and his work for the FBI. I tell that story in detail in a new 10-episode documentary podcast, “Alphabet Boys,” from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts. As part of this investigation, I reviewed more than 300 pages of FBI reports and hours of FBI undercover recordings, as well as publicly available videos recorded by Denver demonstrators and by Windecker himself. I also examined dozens of court files related to Windecker’s past and interviewed more than three dozen racial justice activists who encountered Windecker during the summer of 2020.

The FBI declined to comment on Windecker and the investigation in Denver and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions I sent.
Windecker wouldn’t tell me much either. After I left a note at his old apartment south of Denver explaining that I wanted to interview him about his work for the FBI, he called me. “I do not work for the FBI,” he said. “I’ve never worked for the FBI. If you get proof of me working for the FBI, then I’ll say otherwise. But there’s no proof, because I didn’t work for them.”
I explained that I had FBI reports and recordings to the contrary.
“I don’t talk to the press, I don’t talk to politicians, and I don’t talk to police,” Windecker told me, before hanging up.
Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there.
FBI payment receipt records signed by Windecker show that he was paid more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020, when the FBI aggressively pursued racial justice and left-wing activists based on nothing more than First Amendment-protected activities. The story of the bureau’s infiltration of racial justice activist groups is particularly relevant now, as House Republicans launch a new committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that seems exclusively focused on the FBI’s alleged targeting of right-wing groups.
The FBI’s work in Denver, with Windecker as its eyes and ears on the street, demonstrates the falsity of that narrative.
While on the FBI payroll, Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there by deploying the same controversial tactics the FBI used to devastating effect against Black political groups during the civil rights movement.
Until now, little has been revealed about the FBI’s actions in the summer of 2020. The Denver undercover probe involving Windecker provides the first look behind the scenes at how the FBI viewed and investigated racial justice groups during that turbulent summer.

Windecker-in-Hearse.jpg

Mickey Windecker, sitting in his silver hearse in these stills from FBI undercover video footage, infiltrated racial justice groups in Denver.

Credit: FBI
“I Got a Song for You Guys”
Any accurate description of Windecker sounds like a cartoon. With tattoos all over his body, a scraggly goatee, garishly large rings on his fingers, and a soggy cigar in his mouth, Windecker was hard to miss as he drove the streets of the Mile High City in his silver hearse.
One rainy summer afternoon after becoming a paid informant, Windecker met with his FBI handler, Special Agent Scott Dahlstrom. The federal agent clicked on a hidden camera device.
“It is August 28, 2020, at approximately 4:02 p.m.,” Dahlstrom said into the FBI recorder before handing it to Windecker. The video is part of more than a dozen hours of FBI recordings I obtained documenting Windecker’s work investigating racial justice activists.
Dahlstrom asked Windecker if he remembered his tasking orders — which involved enticing a Black racial justice activist into committing a felony.
“Yep, I got it,” Windecker said. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.”
Windecker walked to his silver hearse, placed the camera on the passenger seat, and started the ignition. Dahlstrom and his FBI colleagues watched the live feed from their black sedan.
“I got a song for you guys,” Windecker said, looking into the camera lens and speaking directly to the FBI agents. He turned up the volume on the silver hearse’s stereo and played “America (Fuck Yeah!),” the theme song from the puppet comedy movie “Team America: World Police”:
America, America
America, fuck yeah!
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah!
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to
America, fuck yeah!

As the song ended, Windecker turned to the camera again, as if on a stage, confident that the FBI agents were watching him.
“America,” Windecker said.
The United States of America had become Windecker’s new employer, and the FBI was paying him to spy on activists that summer day as he barreled down the road. According to internal FBI reports I obtained, Windecker began attending demonstrations in May 2020. He witnessed firsthand what millions of Americans saw on their screens at home: protests turning violent, clashes between left-wing and right-wing activists, demonstrators and instigators setting fires and vandalizing storefronts.
Windecker offered to give the FBI information about protesters. In an internal report, the FBI claimed that Windecker’s motivation for becoming an informant was “to fight terrorists” and that he believed “people who participate in violent civil unrest are terrorists.”
Bureau documents detailed Windecker’s history as both an informant and a criminal, with prior arrests in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida.
In their report adding him to the bureau’s more than 15,000 informants, FBI agents described Windecker as something of a good Samaritan — a kind of volunteer Captain America. But that notion was undercut by other bureau documents, which detailed Windecker’s history as both an informant and a criminal, with prior arrests in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida for crimes including sexual assault.
When Windecker was 20, he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old he met at a roller skating rink. Windecker, who claimed he didn’t know the girl was underage, pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.
In another case, for felony menacing with a weapon in 2001, Windecker stuck a gun in a woman’s face and claimed to be a police officer looking for a suspect. That incident resulted in a felony conviction, and Windecker served two years. While he was in prison, according to FBI internal reports, another inmate tried to hire him to murder someone; instead of committing the crime, Windecker became a cooperating witness and helped convict the people who’d sought to enlist him.
In addition to criminal charges, Windecker has had four protection orders filed against him in Colorado, the most recent in 2021. In a petition for a protection order filed in 2016, a friend of Windecker’s alleged that Windecker had presented a fake police badge and theatened to kill him and his family.
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Windecker claimed to have been a fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force in Iraq. He often said he had diplomatic immunity in the United States due to his association with the Kurds. In 2015, the Daily Beast reported that he was disliked by other volunteer Peshmerga fighters. One American fighter was reported to have described him as “a compulsive liar.”
I spoke to several volunteers who were with Windecker in Iraq; few of them wanted to be publicly associated with him. One of those fighters told me that Windecker claimed to be a demolitions specialist. “Dude was going around literally cutting wires off of IEDs,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices, also known as roadside bombs. “So he could have gotten anybody killed in the vicinity.”
Alan Duncan, a Scottish volunteer fighter with the Peshmerga, told me that he hadn’t fought with Windecker but knew his reputation from the other fighters. Windecker was better known for taking pictures with dead bodies, long after the fighting was finished, than for engaging in combat, Duncan told me. “He was floating about taking a few photos with the Pesh,” Duncan said. “It’s easy to claim to be Peshmerga. But claiming to be Peshmerga and actually being Peshmerga are two different things.”
Cassie Windecker, Mickey Windecker’s third ex-wife, told me that during one of his tours with the Peshmerga, Kurdish fighters had contacted her online to say that he was vacationing more than fighting.
When they first started dating, she recalled, Windecker sent her a picture of thousands of dollars in cash spread over a bed. “Do you want to come home to this every day?” Cassie remembered Windecker asking her. She said that she never knew Windecker to hold down a job during their marriage, but he often had a lot of cash in his pockets.
Cassie had long suspected that her husband was secretly working for the police in some capacity. She said she’d seen him visit local police stations to meet with cops. “Why do you have so much money?” Cassie, who was an exotic dancer at the time, would ask him. “I bust my ass, literally, on a pole. What are you doing?” She told me that Windecker would never give her a straight answer.
In July 2017, after she and Windecker separated, Cassie went to the apartment they had once shared to pick up her mail. In the apartment, Windecker allegedly grabbed Cassie by the neck, slammed her down on a table, and stood over her holding a gun. Cassie screamed as she ran out of the apartment; police arrived and arrested Windecker. The responding officers were wearing body cameras, and I obtained those videos. “He slammed me on my back, on the table, like freaking WWE-style,” Cassie told the cops, her voice breaking with fear.
While in jail following that arrest, Windecker revealed his talents as an informant, according to the police body camera footage.
“One of the officers said that you had to speak to me about a murder?” the arresting officer said to Windecker, speaking through the jail cell door about two hours after the arrest.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Windecker replied matter-of-factly. He then offered information about a murder, and the arresting officer told him he’d have to talk to a detective.
“Hang tight, all right?” the officer said as he walked away. The body camera footage then ended.
While in the hospital for her injuries, Cassie said she received a text from Windecker: “Hey bitch, I’m out.”
Cassie said police officers were still taking her statement in the hospital when the text arrived. “And I showed them the text, and they were just like, ‘We don’t know how he’s out,’” she said.
There is no record in Colorado court files of Windecker being charged, and Cassie said she was not contacted by police or prosecutors following her discharge from the hospital.
Three years later, in the summer of 2020, Windecker approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice activists.
Participants stand on Lincoln Avenue facing Denver police during a protest outside the state Capitol over the death of George Floyd, on May 30, 2020, in Denver.

Photo: David Zalubowski/AP
“We Don’t Investigate Ideology”
As protests broke out in cities like Minneapolis; Denver; and Portland, Oregon, the FBI’s second-in-command, David L. Bowdich, compared the demonstrations to the 9/11 attacks. “When 9/11 occurred, our folks did not quibble about whether there was danger ahead for them,” Bowdich wrote in a memo first obtained by the New York Times. “They ran head-on into peril.” Bowdich described the racial justice demonstrations throughout the country as “a national crisis” whose “violent protesters” were “highly organized.”
Agents suspected these demonstrators could fit into a domestic terrorism ideology the bureau had defined during the first year of the Trump administration as “Black Identity Extremism”: a controversial, widely criticized catchall label for any domestic extremist ideology that drew a Black following. (The FBI has since abandoned the term in favor of a new category called “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” which combines white supremacist violence with so-called Black Identity Extremism.)
What’s been publicly known about the federal government’s activity during the summer of 2020 is astonishing: The Justice Department charged hundreds of people for their roles in First Amendment-protected demonstrations; the Department of Homeland Security deployed more than 750 agents, dressed in military-style uniforms, to Portland and abducted demonstrators in unmarked vans; and the Drug Enforcement Administration, using surveillance powers intended to stop drug runners, spied on more than 50 racial justice groups nationwide, among them a peaceful group that held a vigil on a public university campus in Florida.
Read Our Complete CoverageProtests for Black Lives
The official position of the FBI, whose undercover activities during the summer of 2020 have been largely unknown until now, is that agents do not open investigations based on First Amendment-protected activities. “We don’t investigate ideology. We don’t investigate rhetoric,” the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, told a Senate committee in 2019. “It doesn’t matter how repugnant and how abhorrent or whatever it is.”
But internal reports I obtained suggest otherwise. These documents show that Windecker’s information was about speech, and this apparently justified hiring him as an informant and launching the undercover investigation. He reported that one local activist, Zebb Hall, used incendiary rhetoric in conversations with other demonstrators, claiming that Hall said: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”
Windecker also secretly recorded a conversation in which Hall spoke vaguely of violent revolution and a desire to train for combat. Windecker encouraged Hall with fantastical claims of training antifascist activists in Iraq and Syria as part of what he called the “Red Star Brigade.”
“My type of training that I do is anything from, like, I teach how to shoot a gun to, you know—”
“Hand-to-hand combat?” Hall interrupted.
“Yeah, hand-to-hand combat all the way to blowing up fucking buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics and sabotage,” Windecker replied.
Windecker, secretly working for the FBI, quickly became well-known among Denver’s most committed activists.
“He came off as maybe being a [rookie], but really being into the movement,” Brian Loma, who livestreamed many of the area’s demonstrations that summer, told me.
One of Loma’s videos from July 2020 shows demonstrators marching down a street in Aurora. “Our streets!” they chant. “Our streets!” Windecker’s slow-moving silver hearse can be seen upfront in the video, clearing the way for the demonstrators.
By the next month, Windecker had become a leader of Denver’s racial justice movement. The demonstrators had given him a nickname: Drill Sergeant.
With his military-style jacket and trademark cigar, he’d strut confidently in front of a line of demonstrators, some dressed in homemade armor.
“I can’t hear you!” Windecker would yell.
“No justice! No peace!” the demonstrators would chant back loudly.
Trey Quinn, one of the organizers of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations, speaks on the steps of Denver City Hall on June 29, 2020. Mickey Windecker and the FBI targeted Quinn as part of the undercover probe.

Photo: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
“They’re Preparing for a Genuine Battle”
In 1975, a Senate committee led by the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho investigated the FBI’s civil rights-era domestic surveillance program known as COINTELPRO. Among the FBI abuses documented by the so-called Church Committee was the practice of informants becoming leaders in the organizations they were surveilling, and then accusing the real leaders of being informants themselves — a subversive technique known as “snitch-jacketing.”
While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI. This is clear from the bureau’s investigation of racial justice activists in Denver during the summer of 2020.
As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants. These baseless accusations sowed mistrust and undermined some of the most effective organizers in the community.
Trey Quinn, the Black activist leading protests in Denver, was among the first to suspect that Windecker might be an informant. Quinn devised a way to test Windecker: Speaking in hypotheticals, he asked him about burning down a neighborhood. Could we get it done?
“And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I got the right guy for the job,’” Quinn said. “This is how he’s talking.”
While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI.
Windecker’s enthusiastic response fueled Quinn’s suspicions, but he didn’t have proof, so he didn’t warn other activists then. But Windecker, appearing to view Quinn as a threat to his cover, started telling activists that he suspected Quinn was working for the FBI.
“Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”
Suddenly, Quinn found himself on the outside. His fellow activists stopped communicating with him. As Quinn was being marginalized, Windecker encouraged protesters to become more militant and go on the offensive against the police.
In late August 2020, Hall went to an apartment that served as a base for Windecker and the young allies he’d recruited. Inside, Hall saw a table covered with guns. “I’m like, ‘Holy fuck,’” Hall recalled.
Another activist, who was with Hall in the apartment but asked not to be named because she fears retribution for speaking publicly, confirmed Hall’s account. “There are guns, weapons, medical supplies, literally looking like they’re preparing for a genuine battle,” she told me.
From August 22 to August 29, 2020, a series of demonstrations in Denver morphed into assaults on police stations, with protesters carrying homemade shields and hurling rocks and fireworks at police. The demonstrators called one of these events “Give ’Em Hell.” More than 70 police officers were injured that week.
The police response was ferocious. Officers in riot gear broke bones and fired pepper balls and rubber bullets. One man was hit in the head with a lead-filled bag fired from a police shotgun. A stingball grenade exploded next to a woman, knocking out her teeth. In the first civil judgment awarded at trial for police brutality in response to protests triggered by the Floyd killing, Denver police were forced last spring to pay $14 million to 12 protesters.
According to more than a dozen activists I spoke to in the Denver area, Windecker, the FBI’s informant, helped organize and promote these protests, which quickly turned violent.
Denver police officers fire canisters to disperse a protest outside the state Capitol, May 28, 2020, in Denver.

Photo: David Zalubowski/AP
“You Need to Have an Objective”
A pervasive social media and cable news narrative in the summer of 2020 was that racial justice and antifascist activists were becoming increasingly violent and destructive.
“The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups,” President Donald Trump said. Right-wing news media reinforced and amplified that message. “Violent young men with guns will be in charge,” Tucker Carlson told his large audience on Fox News, adding: “You will not want to live here when that happens.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent, watched from his home in California as this narrative took hold. “It was frustrating for me to see how ably — usually that’s not a term that you use when you’re referencing former President Trump — but how ably he was able to make this boogeyman out of antifa,” German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told me.
According to FBI files and videos, Windecker’s mandate from the FBI wasn’t just to provide information about racial justice protesters — though his “intelligence” about activists filled dozens of reports — but also to try to set up protesters in a conspiracy that would have supported Trump’s claims.
On orders from the FBI, Windecker targeted two Black activists: Hall, whose incendiary rhetoric Windecker had first reported to his handlers; and Bryce Shelby, a slender man with a reputation for giving fiery speeches with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Windecker invited both men to lunch in late August 2020 at a barbecue restaurant. Windecker said he’d brought them together because they were “talking about the same shit,” by which Windecker meant the prospect of protests turning violent. Windecker told them he had a friend — “an outlaw biker buddy” — who could supply whatever they needed, including weapons.
“You need to have an objective of what you’re gonna do,” Windecker told the two men. “If Bryce is planning on like, ‘OK, I want to blow up a motherfuckin’ courthouse,’ I need to know what the game plans are.”
But Windecker’s operation in Denver failed to generate a headline-grabbing conspiracy. Hall declined to participate in a violent plot. Windecker introduced Shelby to his supposed outlaw biker buddy — an FBI undercover agent who went by the nickname “Red” — and together they drove to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s home. As a hidden camera recorded them, the undercover agent encouraged Shelby to commit to a plot to assassinate Weiser, and even suggested they could hire a hitman for as little as $500. Still, Shelby refused to move forward with any plans and immediately cut off contact with Windecker and the undercover agent. Although Shelby was not charged with a crime, local prosecutors used the FBI’s undercover recordings to convince a judge to seize Shelby’s guns under Colorado’s red flag law.

zebb-hall.jpg

Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall was among the Denver activists who became close to Mickey Windecker, not knowing he was a paid FBI informant.

Photo: Trevor Aaronson
“I Was Just Afraid of Him”
A week after trying to rope Hall and Shelby into a violent plot, Windecker had drawn enough suspicion that an antifascist activist group in Colorado Springs, south of Denver, posted a Twitter thread detailing its concerns. “Be careful around this dude,” the group wrote on Twitter. “Probably wise not to let him in your protest space.”
Although the group didn’t have evidence that Windecker was an informant, the public allegation threatened to damage his cover. Activists in Colorado took the claim seriously.
“You heard through different groups: ‘Kick his ass on sight.’ ‘Fuck him.’ ‘Don’t let him around the groups,’” Hall remembered.
Windecker gathered his allies, including Hall, at the apartment in Denver where activists had seen the table covered with guns. Windecker wanted to record a video and post it to YouTube in response to the allegations. He created a stage for the video: a flag for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and an AR-15-style assault rifle propped against the wall behind him, and, on the table before him, a ball-peen hammer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“He had a cigar and was acting all tough,” Hall said.

Windecker-YouTube-Video-embed.jpg


After an antifascist group in Colorado accused him of being an informant, Mickey Windecker posted a video response to YouTube in which he denied the accusation. “I will be polite and professional, but I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be,” Windecker threatened.

Credit: YouTube

Wearing a custom-made black Punisher T-shirt, Windecker stared into the camera.

“This propaganda shit you guys posted doesn’t mean fuck all to me,” Windecker said in his gravelly voice, sounding furious. “But understand this: I will be polite and professional, but I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be … If you’re trying to implicate that I’m a fucking snitch, check this out. Three things I ain’t: a punk, I ain’t a bitch, and I ain’t a fucking snitch.”
Watching as Windecker recorded the video, Hall was struck by how defensive he seemed. He finally accepted what he’d long thought impossible: Windecker, the activist leader encouraging everyone to become more militant, must be a secret government informant.
That created a problem for Hall. Windecker had given Hall money days earlier and asked him to buy a gun. Hall had agreed and bought a Smith & Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon. Hall didn’t think he had a choice in the transaction. He believed that Windecker, who made the looming prospect of violence part of his identity, would come after him if he refused. “I was just afraid of him,” Hall explained. “I was fucking terrified of this guy.”
After he made the video, Windecker and his silver hearse disappeared. In July 2021, nearly a year after he’d bought the gun for Windecker, federal agents arrested Hall. He pleaded guilty to a felony firearms violation — for buying a gun, with the government’s money, for the government’s informant — and received three years of probation. That was the extent of the plot Windecker and the FBI succeeded in engineering among the racial justice activists that summer.
Many of the activist groups in Denver have splintered or disbanded. There was a lot of distrust. Activists there told me they suspected government agents had infiltrated the groups to encourage the violence that occurred, but until now, they’d never had proof.
“The FBI caused violence here,” Hall said. “They don’t want people to know that.”

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Trevor Aaronsontrevor@trevoraaronson.com@trevoraaronson
ADDITIONAL CREDITS:
Research: Margot Williams.
https://theintercept.com/

Brotha should have fought it to expose their plot cause this is entrapment, but I get it, you got cops telling you to make a deal and you'll be in your bed with a slap on the wrist.
 
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Ballatician

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”

A cac?:hmm:

Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.
“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”


I’m curious to know what impressed them about him?

As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants

I’m surprised he gained that much influence. We are too trusting
 

0utsyder

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”

A cac?:hmm:

Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.
“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”


I’m curious to know what impressed them about him?

As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants

I’m surprised he gained that much influence. We are too trusting

A white person that believes in the same shyt a black person believes raises flags for me. The minute they want to start burning shyt down for black people...yeah, this guys a cop.
 

slewdem100

Rising Star
OG Investor
Will come back and read the whole thing...from the initial paragraphs, this dude shouldn't have been able to get this close....this is what happens when the movement has many people who have the passion but lack the knowledge of revolution....one has to read books of prior revolutionary movements and what made them succeed or fail...this dude was clearly too extra...hopefully lessons will be learned from this
 

Mrfreddygoodbud

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Ive been telling dudes for years now..

any group that involves TWO or MORE BRUH's..

will be compromised..

ESPECIALLY STREET GANGS and Groups like The Moors of America,

and Nation Of Islam..

they were tryin to go hard labeling Us as domestic terrorist..

everything they are doing is backfiring in their fuckin faces..

being exposed with the quickness.. they already lost, they

just have enough power to cover it up and create the illusion,

they are winning, when their whole ship is sinking...

bad for them

Great for those that want to truly live FREE!!!
 

CPT Callamity

Titty Feelin Villain
BGOL Investor
This is why I cannot just join any "movement." I'd much rather roll with thorough and vetted folks that I know. Move like ghosts and trust no one outside the circle.
Same sentiment when I saw that fake DJ scammer leading a bunch of armed black folks. I'm also not joining any movement spearheaded but shady lesbians or people that raise more questions than answers.
 

0utsyder

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
This is why I cannot just join any "movement." I'd much rather roll with thorough and vetted folks that I know. Move like ghosts and trust no one outside the circle.
Same sentiment when I saw that fake DJ scammer leading a bunch of armed black folks. I'm also not joining any movement spearheaded but shady lesbians or people that raise more questions than answers.

But then you get splinter groups that THINK they follow you and then fcuk your whole movement up!
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered


I was watching how they setup their operations, it is quite sophisticated. Buying an expensive home in key strategic cities, especially a white area is a smart move. Apartments and hotels are highly suspectable to surveillance, a number of people have access to your property at any time.

You want to live in area, where the normal background noise of violence is rare; they can't sell that story you just part of the violence. Hence this is why they picked a white enclave to live.
 

Politic Negro

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Here's another one

The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
cheslie-april-rogers-housing-march.jpg
chelsie-april-rogers-opening-chinook-center.jpg

Protestors demonstrate in Colorado Springs following the murder of George Floyd, on May 30, 2020. Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
Trevor Aaronson
March 21 2023, 5:00 a.m.
The young woman with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.
“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.
The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.
“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.
“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”
But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.
April Rogers, left, a police officer who went undercover for the FBI in the Colorado Springs activist community, participating in a housing-rights march during which several activists were arrested.
Photo courtesy of Chinook Center.

The work of Rogers, or “Chelsie,” is a direct offshoot of the FBI’s summer of 2020 investigation in Denver, where Mickey Windecker, a paid FBI informant, drove a silver hearse, rose to a leadership role in the racial justice movement, and encouraged activists to become violent. Windecker provided information to the FBI about an activist who attended demonstrations in both Denver and Colorado Springs, prompting federal agents to launch a new investigation in the smaller Colorado city. I tell the story of Windecker and his FBI work, as well as the investigation in Colorado Springs, in “Alphabet Boys,” a 10-episode documentary podcast from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts.
As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.
The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement
Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes, including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.
To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation, a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.
The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.
For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.
This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”
The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.
A protester confronts a Colorado Springs police officer about the death of De’Von Bailey, 19, who was shot and killed by police in 2019, during a 2020 protest against police brutality in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
“Nowhere Is Safe”
The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey, who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.
On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.
“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”
“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”
They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.
Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted: “Nowhere is safe.”
Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.
A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.
“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”
For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.
Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.
For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.
On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”
The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.
In body-camera footage, Colorado Springs police Officer Scott Alamo revealed an intelligence report filled with pictures of local activists taken from social media.
Credit: Colorado Springs Police Department.
“Boot to the Face”
Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.
“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”
Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
FBI Provides Chicago Police With Fake Online Identities for “Social Media Exploitation” Team
Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”
As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.
“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”
And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.
Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”
As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.
“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”
The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.
“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.
Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.
“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”
A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.
Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”
Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.
Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.
“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.
Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.
Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta (left/top) pushed her bike down in a panic as a police officer in riot gear charged toward her during a housing-rights march. Minutes later, police arrested Charles Johnson (right/bottom), forcing him to the ground.Left/top photo: Colorado Springs Police Department. Right/bottom photo: Colorado Indigenous Brown Berets.
“I Never Saw Any Grenades”
Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.
One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.
Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.
Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”
Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.
Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.
Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”
But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.
Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.
Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.
“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.
The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”
That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.
Protesters march down the street, demanding justice in the death of George Floyd and an end to police brutality on May 30, 2020, in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”
In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.
“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”
Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.
“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.
Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.
The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.
“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”
Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.
Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously, you know?”
Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.
April Rogers, claiming to be an activist named “Chelsie,” volunteered at the Chinook Center, where she had access to some records and email accounts.
Photo courtesy of the Chinook Center.
“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”
In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.
During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.
The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.
“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.
“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.
“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.
“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.
“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”
“I respectfully decline to answer.”
“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.
“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.
Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.
“People have become more cautious, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”
The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.
Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.
Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”
Mourners gather outside Club Q to visit a memorial on Nov. 25, 2022, in Colorado Spring, Colo.
Photo: Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP
“Something Went Boom”
A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.
Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.
As with the killer in the Pulse attack, the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich. They closed that inquiry less than a month later.
As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.
“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”
 

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The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
cheslie-april-rogers-housing-march.jpg
chelsie-april-rogers-opening-chinook-center.jpg

Protestors demonstrate in Colorado Springs following the murder of George Floyd, on May 30, 2020. Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
Trevor Aaronson
March 21 2023, 5:00 a.m.
The young woman with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.
“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.
The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.
“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.
“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”
But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.
April Rogers, left, a police officer who went undercover for the FBI in the Colorado Springs activist community, participating in a housing-rights march during which several activists were arrested.
Photo courtesy of Chinook Center.

The work of Rogers, or “Chelsie,” is a direct offshoot of the FBI’s summer of 2020 investigation in Denver, where Mickey Windecker, a paid FBI informant, drove a silver hearse, rose to a leadership role in the racial justice movement, and encouraged activists to become violent. Windecker provided information to the FBI about an activist who attended demonstrations in both Denver and Colorado Springs, prompting federal agents to launch a new investigation in the smaller Colorado city. I tell the story of Windecker and his FBI work, as well as the investigation in Colorado Springs, in “Alphabet Boys,” a 10-episode documentary podcast from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts.
As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.
The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement
Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes, including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.
To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation, a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.
The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.
For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.
This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”
The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.
A protester confronts a Colorado Springs police officer about the death of De’Von Bailey, 19, who was shot and killed by police in 2019, during a 2020 protest against police brutality in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
“Nowhere Is Safe”
The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey, who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.
On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.
“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”
“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”
They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.
Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted: “Nowhere is safe.”
Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.
A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.
“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”

Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.
For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.
On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”
The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.
In body-camera footage, Colorado Springs police Officer Scott Alamo revealed an intelligence report filled with pictures of local activists taken from social media.
Credit: Colorado Springs Police Department.
“Boot to the Face”
Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.
“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”
Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
FBI Provides Chicago Police With Fake Online Identities for “Social Media Exploitation” Team
Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”
As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.
“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”
And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.
Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”
As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.
“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”
The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.
“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.
Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.
“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”
A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.
Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”
Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.
Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.
“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.
Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.
Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta (left/top) pushed her bike down in a panic as a police officer in riot gear charged toward her during a housing-rights march. Minutes later, police arrested Charles Johnson (right/bottom), forcing him to the ground.Left/top photo: Colorado Springs Police Department. Right/bottom photo: Colorado Indigenous Brown Berets.
“I Never Saw Any Grenades”
Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.
One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.
Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.
Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”
Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.
Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.
Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”
But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.
Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.
Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.
“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.
The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”
That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.
Protesters march down the street, demanding justice in the death of George Floyd and an end to police brutality on May 30, 2020, in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Photo: Chancey Bush/The Gazette via AP
“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”
In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.
“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”
Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.
“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.
Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.
The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.
“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”
Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.
Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously, you know?”
Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.
April Rogers, claiming to be an activist named “Chelsie,” volunteered at the Chinook Center, where she had access to some records and email accounts.
Photo courtesy of the Chinook Center.
“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”
In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.
During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.
The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.
“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.
“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.
“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.
“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.
“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”
“I respectfully decline to answer.”
“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.
“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.
Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.

The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.
Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.
Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”
Mourners gather outside Club Q to visit a memorial on Nov. 25, 2022, in Colorado Spring, Colo.
Photo: Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP
“Something Went Boom”
A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.
Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.
As with the killer in the Pulse attack, the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich. They closed that inquiry less than a month later.
As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.
“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”
They are not even trying to get our own people to infiltrate. That’s how easy they think it is….

:lol:
 

yureeka9

Rising Star
Platinum Member
Its getting easier and easier to infiltrate a social justice group. They may have to screen women by making them fuck everybody in the organization on tape before they're given admission! That would clear it up quick for the female infiltrators!
 

FuriousStyles

Rising Star
Registered
I'm late to this but there's no fucking way I'm trusting a white dude. Especially no middle aged white dude. WTF?! I don't care what he claimed his background was.
 

tajshan

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”

A cac?:hmm:

Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.
“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”


I’m curious to know what impressed them about him?

As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants

I’m surprised he gained that much influence. We are too trusting
THIS!!!! This "inclusiveness" could be considered as one of our problems.
 

Lexx Diamond

Art Lover ❤️ Sex Addict®™
Staff member
Those dirty fucking feds are the creators of many a terrorist organization in the US. Those dirty fed devils will start radical organizations, recruit people, teach them how to properly perform seditious and terrorist acts. Then arrest the whole fucking lot of them.
 
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