by Timothy Egan
THE INEPT HANDLING of Black’s fall was typical of what Bamonte had run into ever since he came back to the Pend Oreille. As a boy, he knew little outside his father’s harsh world: cut trees; dig inside the mines; keep the roof from leaking and venison on the table. Suffering was not questioned; pain was part of the landscape. As a man, he was not so passive. He had been exposed to the highest level of American intrigue in the dawning war in Vietnam. While serving as a military guard in 1962, he heard Henry Cabot Lodge, the United States ambassador to South Vietnam, tell President Ngo Dinh Diem that everything was fine one hour before Diem would fall in a coup supported by Washington. Later, as a helicopter door-gunner, Bamonte was ordered to fire at whatever human movement he saw on the ground below—children, women, and combatants alike. Once, his pilot chased a fleeing family carrying all their possessions in an old wooden cart. As the chopper lowered down atop them, the family members fell to their knees, crying for mercy; the pilot flew away laughing. Bamonte felt betrayed and confused by his country’s mission in Vietnam. In 1966 he joined the police department in Spokane and saw the foolish crimes and the patterns of petty fraud that form the education of a cop. He stood on the outer edges of a good-ol’-boy system among Spokane police, where a case of whiskey at Christmas could keep an officer loyal to a duplicitous merchant. He had shunned the after-hours parties to attend night classes at college. After eight years of off-and-on study, the boy who flunked his senior year in high school ended up with a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from Whitworth College.
Back in the Pend Oreille in the 1970s, Bamonte did not expect to find his home frozen in time. Pend Oreille County, one of the poorest per capita in America, is still an area where much business is done by bartering. A family might trade two cords of wood and a case of canned huckleberries for a used television and a case of beer. A barterers’ fair, held once a week along the banks of the river, is the principal shopping exchange for many. A few tourist dollars pass through the county during the summer, but the only steady source of money comes from timber and mining. Still, there are few sites in more gold-plated counties to match a dawn in the Selkirks, when the mountains shake the clouds from the hair of the forest.
Bamonte came back to the Pend Oreille to construct log homes and run a small mill that produced cedar shakes. After eight years riding a motorcycle for the Spokane Police Department, law enforcement was behind him—or so he thought. He built more than a dozen log homes, selecting and cutting the trees himself, skinning the wood and notching pieces together. A Bamonte log home was no wooden hovel but a grand house, usually three bedrooms or more, with skylights and brick fireplace and vaulted ceilings of clean-smelling cedar. His father could have lived his last years in regal comfort had he been around to experience the creations of his son.
Trying to keep a family alive on the speculative schemes of an elegant-log-home builder was a continuous fight. The work was long and it did not pay well. Most of the land in the county is owned by the federal government and administered by the Forest Service. Throughout the 1970s, as the service stepped up its program of selling trees from national forests to the highest bidder, great swaths of the Pend Oreille’s pine, cedar, larch, and Douglas fir were mowed down by large timber companies. When all the trees in a given area were cut, and roads carved into the hillsides, the slash, or woody debris, left on the ground was burned. The idea, promoted by the timber industry, was to get rid of all the excess vegetation so that when the land was replanted, only a few stands of commercial trees would grow back, without competition from the random plantings of nature. In late summer, smoke from the government-sponsored fires drifted down the Pend Oreille valley and stung the eyes. The haze lingered for weeks, fouling what is usually some of the cleanest air in the country.
Bamonte was disgusted by the clear-cuts and slash-burning and bidding among buddies. The entire forest did not have to be leveled and burned in order to bring wood to mills, he told the rangers in the Kaniksu and Colville national forests. Why not leave every other tree standing, protecting the scenery and habitat for elk, bears, caribou, and the tiny creatures who work the floor of the forest? He was told clear-cuts and deliberate fires were government policy, and one little gyppo logger was not going to change things. Bamonte began showing up at the auctions, the lone critic, submitting his bids for small parcels; and when all the buying and selling was done, he would be left with nothing but salvage. For a price, he would be allowed to take whatever the big timber companies left on the ground, the unwanted scrub wood. The Forest Service was simply not set up to serve one-man operations. If Bamonte could lay waste to an entire mountainside, as the bigger companies, like Boise Cascade or Louisiana-Pacific, were doing, then the government might be able to accommodate him.
“A good logger doesn’t want to clear-cut,” Bamonte told the Forest Service land managers. “A good logger respects the forest.” The industry men would look at each other, holding their smirks: who’s the Boy Scout?
He wrote letters to federal bureaucrats in Washington, politicians, the newspapers. He made noise at every auction. He was a pain in the ass. He tried to get the United States attorney in his district to investigate possible collusion and antitrust violations. After a while, Bamonte’s noisemaking began to pay off, and he started to get more than salvage. It looked as if he might be able to make a decent living. His crowning achievement during this brief spate of cooperation was a masterwork of log construction, a six-thousand-square-foot home, forty feet high, with an indoor swimming pool. He selected and peeled every one of the logs that went into the home. But the project nearly broke him, physically and financially. He slipped further behind; like his father, he found his only solution was to work harder, more furiously—to become a machine.
After three years of trying to make a go at it, worn down by the fights with the Forest Service and wresting logs from the Selkirks, Bamonte closed his timber operation. The woods had not brought him any riches, but he made his mark nonetheless: three top Forest Service officials were transferred out of the Pend Oreille, and the service ended noncompetitive bidding in the inland Northwest. In meadows shaded by aspen groves and lanky pines are Bamonte log homes, designed to hold their own against the ages. The builder, unable to afford any of his creations, moved into a rental unit.
Even though he could make more money if he went back on the Spokane police force, Bamonte decided to stay in the Pend Oreille. From his father he had inherited a tenacity to cling to the land, no matter how much heartbreak or backache might come from the attachment. He took a job with the county sheriff’s department as a deputy, earning thirteen thousand dollars a year. In 1978, he ran for sheriff, a Democrat trying to unseat the Republican, William “Pete” Giles, who’d been the law in Pend Oreille County off and on since the early 1950s. Bamonte campaigned on a plan to bring some of the technology and skill of late-twentieth-century crime fighting to the wilderness of northeastern Washington. The department had no written policies on how to make an arrest, conduct an investigation, file an accident report, follow up on a crime, store stolen property. It was a black hole, run by a man his own deputies characterized as an incompetent antique. “To him, the three biggest crimes are cattle rustling, safecracking, and cohabitation,” one of Giles’s deputies said during the election.
Bamonte was a youthful thirty-six—nearly half Giles’s age—and he promised to bring a fresh approach to the Pend Oreille. The voters approved; Bamonte whipped the Republican in the 1978 sheriff’s race.
He inherited a department in chaos—one part Mayberry, one part backwoods dictatorship. Work-release prisoners were given keys to the jail and put in the same cells as fresh felons. There was no record system for case files, and several major investigations were stalled or fell apart completely because files were lost or could not be found. Most police departments hold auctions several times a year to sell excess or unclaimed property. Bamonte discovered that the last time the Pend Oreille County sheriff’s office had offered such
a sale was in 1914. He immediately announced plans for annual auctions. But during his first month in office, when Bamonte conducted an inventory of the property room—a search for all the guns, stereos, engines, tools, and money confiscated by officers during the last half-century—he discovered there was nothing to sell. The property room was empty. The spoils of police work in the Pend Oreille, some of the older deputies explained to their new sheriff, have always belonged to the officers themselves. The idea that a cop could skim off whatever excess he picked up from criminals was not unique to policemen in Newport. Bamonte had run into this attitude before, during his years in Spokane. The new sheriff laid down a new law: the property room belonged to the public.
Within a month of taking office, Bamonte drew up a set of written guidelines, covering everything from officers’ ethics to investigative techniques. Still, change came slowly to the deputies of the Selkirks. Early on in Bamonte’s first term, a woman’s body was found inside a car; she had been shot. Homicides are rare in Pend Oreille County—a murder every two years or so. The undersheriff who was sent to investigate removed the body and towed the car away before thoroughly checking the crime scene. Bamonte demoted him. A dispatcher who spent her night shift catching up on her sleep was suspended. (During a civil service hearing on the suspension, she claimed her eyes were prone to “momentarily shutting” which gave the appearance of sleep.) Officers who would not go along with Bamonte’s new policies were fired or threatened with demotion. They said Bamonte was tyrannical, shaking things up too fast, an upstart headed for trouble.
“If I get a deputy who is not honest or not doing the job, I get rid of him,” Bamonte said at the time, explaining his policy to the Newport Miner, which was fed a steady diet of leaks by disgruntled officers. For a while, there was a different story about turmoil at the sheriff’s office every week, with unflattering pictures of Bamonte, his eyes half-closed or looking away in a scowl, under headlines that labeled him “embattled.” Even when he was vindicated in court or during public hearings, the stories castigated him. Thus, when Bamonte won an early triumph in a civil suit brought by a former deputy, the article in the Miner was headlined BAMONTE AVERTS CONTEMPT CHARGE, and the lead sentence ran, “A legal technicality foiled a temporary restraining order and possible contempt charge against Pend Oreille County Sheriff Anthony Bamonte Tuesday.” Tony’s wife, Betty, would clip the worst of the stories out before presenting her husband with the paper in the morning, but the Swiss cheese only told him it was going to be another bad day, full of whispers.
One undersheriff got his revenge by snapping a picture of a marijuana plant in Bamonte’s office, then giving it to the Miner, which ran the photo on its front page. The implication was that the young sheriff was growing six-foot marijuana plants in his office. In a county where pot has been the major cash crop, grown in the pleats of land high in the roadless Selkirks, the charge was taken seriously by some, though Bamonte simply was using the pot plant as a training tool for his officers and for Forest Service employees who roamed the backwoods. The deputy who took the picture was fired.
And it was not just among sheriff’s deputies that the old ways were challenged by Bamonte. To him a politician, even one who controlled his budget, was just another citizen. So when Bamonte caught a key county commissioner speeding one night, he issued a citation and also wrote him up for driving without a vehicle license. The commissioner was outraged. He got his revenge when it came time to approve Bamonte’s staff budget. All money for the sheriff’s office—twelve full-time employees—was held up. With no funds to operate, Bamonte declared his department broke and shut it down. All patrol cars were parked. For one week in late summer, there was no official law enforcement in northeast Washington. Stories about the dispute ran in newspapers all over the country. The commissioners blinked first, approving $2,000 for gas money, so that there was at least fuel for the patrol cars to respond to emergencies. They eventually passed a skeletal budget, about $350,000—far below what Bamonte said he needed to bring the sheriff’s department out of the dark ages.
Sheriff Bamonte then committed an unpardonable offense: he went to bat for a convicted felon, a man who had spent seven years in the penitentiary after a jury in Pend Oreille found him guilty of shooting a sheriff’s deputy (a nonfatal wound). Bamonte discovered evidence that the wrong man had been locked up, the victim of police zealotry and incompetence. It was his duty as sheriff to admit that a mistake had been made by his office and to try to get the man his freedom. His deputies could not believe what their sheriff was doing; even if he was right, he was taking the position of the Other Side. A cop simply did not break ranks with other cops. When the new evidence uncovered by Bamonte was brought to court, the man, Jackson C. Marshall, was freed. Bamonte was considered a traitor.
Near the end of Bamonte’s first term, seven former employees ran against him. The Miner also campaigned to oust the young sheriff. His critics said he was too righteous for his own good, too hard on his deputies. By most indications, Bamonte was difficult to work for during his first term: he lacked diplomacy and tact; he was stubborn; at times he seemed wired with the pulse of a two-year-old on a sugar high. But he got results. FBI statistics showed a drop in all major crime categories in the second half of his first term. When a day worker from a hay ranch was stomped in the Usk Saloon, and nine witnesses watched him bleed to death on the sidewalk outside the tavern, the prevailing attitude in the timber village north of Newport was to let it die. Just a bar fight and a dead stranger—Who cares? Bamonte leaned on each of the nine witnesses until he found one who said he was sober enough to remember what happened. Manslaughter charges were filed and a conviction obtained.
Bamonte won the 1982 primary election by seventy-six votes, from nineteen hundred cast. Two months later, he beat the former deputy who had tried to frame him with the pot plant. He was in for another four years.
His targets were more select in the 1980s.
Each human life was sacred, he told his deputies, no matter how awful a piece of scum someone might be. The law did not make distinctions for character, or uniform, or smell. This philosophy guided Bamonte when a convict was killed while fighting a forest fire in Pend Oreille County in 1986. Every summer, the state of Washington would take work-release inmates out into the woods to build trails or fight fires. A man named Cash Hopkins, who was finishing up a sentence for burglary, was working a burn in the Selkirks when a flaming tree came falling down on him. Hopkins was crushed by the hot pine. In announcing the death, the Forest Service said it was a simple accident: if Hopkins had run, he would not have been crushed. Bamonte investigated further and discovered that the fire had been started by the Forest Service—a slash burn to help the timber industry. Examining the government’s manual for prescription burns, Bamonte found that the Forest Service had violated its own policies. They weren’t supposed to start fires during high winds, or times of extreme temperature, or on steep slopes, or after a prolonged dry period, when the woods were tinder. And after starting the fire, the service initially let it burn unattended, and flames had jumped the boundary of the controlled burn. What’s more, Bamonte produced two Forest Service rangers who said they’d been told by their superiors to keep quiet about the fire.
“If a civilian had started this fire I would have initiated charges of reckless burning against him, and because of the death, he could have been charged with manslaughter,” Bamonte said. The sheriff could not charge the federal government, but he tried to interest the United States attorney’s office in the case. After all, the Forest Service itself had initiated prosecution of campers or loggers whose negligence had led to fires. Was there a double standard: one for individuals, another for bureaucracies? The Spokane office of the Justice Department turned Bamonte down. Who is this guy? Trying to sue the government? Sticking up for a dead convict? Doesn’t he have better things to do?
Thwarted at the local level, Bamonte sent his investigative report to the office of Edwin Meese. To
Bamonte, it was very clear: the government was morally and legally accountable for the death of Cash Hopkins. The United States attorney had betrayed the public trust by not investigating the fire that killed the convict. “Justice was not served,” the sheriff from the wilderness county in northeast Washington wrote to the highest law-enforcement officer in the land. He was surprised when Ronald Reagan’s attorney general did not respond.
Most nights, Bamonte could not leave the problems of his county inside the sheriff’s office. He brought them home, kicked them around at the dinner table, ran them through his head while lying awake, and then started the next day with the stale conflict as his first thought. All the criticism, the ridicule by the newspaper and the contempt from the older deputies, had started to wear him down. More and more, he would lapse into self-doubt, the little boy who used to sleep in the tent next to his father, scared of being abandoned. He wanted most what he could not control: the affections of his wife, the esteem of the community he served. Betty wanted to see less of the sheriff and more of the man, but he could not rest while things were unsettled. She urged him to laugh more, to relax, to unclutter himself. There was, after all, plenty to laugh about. The Rainbow Family, for example—seven thousand aging hippies, led by a man named Laughing Heart, who one year had chosen a wide, flowered meadow in the Selkirks as the site of their annual gathering. For five days, they ran naked through the fields, camped in tepees and leantos, a carnival of herbal confections and pubic hair. One of Bamonte’s deputies donned a green mask and a cape—he called himself “the Green Ranger”—and galloped through the meadow on a black horse.
A year later, an encounter with the chairman of the school board, who’d been accused of neglecting his horse, turned into a kung fu-type showdown in Metaline Falls. The man returned the sheriff’s accusation with a claim that Bamonte’s dog had bitten his girlfriend on the hand. He then challenged Bamonte to a fight, telling him to leave his guns inside his house and meet him in the middle of the street. Citizens gathered to witness the duel between public officials. When Bamonte showed up, the challenger—an expert in the Korean martial art of Tang Soo Do—was in the midst of a choreographed tune-up, slicing the air with his hands and feet.