COURT CALENDAR

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1996:

Crimes vs. humans
The “Lords of Chaos,”
charged May 4 with the April 30
thrill-killing of music teacher Mark
Schwebes at his home in Pine Manor,
Florida, began a two-week spree of
arson, robbery and mayhem by burning
two large macaws alive in their
cage at The Hut, a local restaurant.
Facing murder charges are K e v i n
Foster, 18; Christopher Black, 18;
Derek Shields, 18; and P e t e r
Magnotti, 17. A fifth gang member,
Christopher Burnett, 17, is
charged only with conspiracy to commit
armed robbery.

Martin Bryant, 28,
charged with massacring 35 people
on April 29 at a Tasmanian tourist
site, was longtime companion to a
much older suspected animal collector,
from whom he inherited
$390,000 in assets after she died in a
1992 car crash, and was an avid fishing
and shooting enthusiast.
Police in Miami, Florida,
were stunned on April 23 when a
reward fund set up by the A n i m a l
Rights Foundation of Florida r o s e
over $10,000 in less than four hours
after a story about a dog-burning hit
the TV news. Police lieutenant B i l l
S c h w a r t z contrasted the response to
the public indifference toward the
recent unsolved burning murders of
three homeless women. Responded
Serge Ferrer, a friend of the dead
dog, “Whoever did this to an animal
would do it to a person.” FBI data on
the association of animal abuse and
arson with serial murder suggests the
killers may be one and the same.
Anatoly Onupienko, 37,
of Yavoriv, Ukraine, arrested in
April for 52 murders, said he
hadn’t killed a senior police officer’s
family because he saw them take
delivery of a dead pig while lying in
ambush in their courtyard, and
thought it a bad omen.
Slaughterhouse worker
Jason Baldwin, 28, already on probation
for an unprovoked attack on a
co-worker, on April 15 pleaded
guilty to manslaughter in the dismemberment
murder of neighbor Maxine
Boot, 37––whom he killed with
“considerable pleasure,” said prosecutor
Robert Seabrook, just because
he disliked her.
Kennedy Martin, 24, of
Rome, New York, pleaded guilty
on May 11 to reduced charges of
first-degree attempted sodomy and
use of a child in a sexual performance,
for allegedly coercing a
minor in the village of Rossie to perform
sexual acts with a dog in 1994
and 1996. Martin is to be sentenced
to up to 16 years in prison on June 23
in St. Lawrence County Court.
Crimes vs. wildlife
Federal judge Elaine
Bucklo on May 17 rejected convicted
bird smuggler Tony Silva’s a t t e m p t
in mid-sentencing hearing to withdraw
the guilty plea to single counts
of conspiracy and tax evasion that he
entered in January. Silva, 36, and
his mother, Gila Daoud, were
allegedly major international rare bird
traffickers while posing as outspoken
foes of the wild-caught bird trade.
Silva may have changed his mind
about plea-bargaining after former
Playboy Mansion animal keeper
Theodora Swanson, 36, drew 37
months in prison in April 1 for helping
her boyfriend, William Wegner,
44, run a ring that stole cockatoo
eggs from nests in Australia and bootlegged
them into the U.S. Five of
Silva’s codefendants, including
Wegner, copped pleas but drew
markedly more time than Swanson,
who fought the charges.
Taxidermist and wildlife
trafficker Nicholaas Peters, 41, a
Dutch native with homes in England
and Belgium, on May 10 drew a
plea-bargained two-year prison term
from a British court. The skins of
more than 500 animals, including 42
specimens of 16 species of endangered
bird, were found on his
premises last August.
Judge Kim Goldberger of
Jefferson County, Colorado, on May
6 fined Karl Mayne, 54, of Confer,
$9,137 and ordered him to do 150
hours of community service for massacring
a bear and her two cubs on
September 23, 1995. An outspoken
advocate of shooting nuisance bears,
Mayne became a wise-use wiseguy
cause celebre after claiming he killed
the bears to protect neighbors Tom
and Jeanie Flavin, who testified that
they called him because they didn’t
think sheriff’s deputies would quickly
respond. The jury was not convinced.
Prison guard James
Edward Tyson, 27, and pal Donald
Edwin Gladden, 23, of Oakhurst,
Texas, were on April 14 fined
$20,000 and $5,000, respectively,
for shooting a bald eagle on January 2
and posing with the carcass. They
claimed they were protecting chickens.
Yet to be sentenced in a separate
but parallel case is sheep rancher
Gerald Bertagnole, 66, of the East
Canyon region in Utah, who pleaded
guilty on May 5 to a single count of
illegally distributing pesticides.
Bertagnole had been charged with
poisoning eight bald eagles and a
golden eagle in 1992. Bald eagles
were dropped from the federal
Endangered Species List in July
1994, but––as eagle-killers and
feather merchants continue to learn
––remain federally protected.
Police in Huizhou, China,
on May 6 arrested five people f o r
allegedly trafficking in panda pelts.
They allegedly bought two panda
pelts in 1994 for $843, and tried to
sell them this year for $57,830.
Activism
New York State Supreme
Court Justice Joseph J. Dowd ruled
on April 30 that the State University
of New York must provide copies of
documents certifying the origins of
dogs and cats used in the SUNY
Health Science Center at Brooklyn
laboratories to Citizens for Alternatives
to Animal Labs. The CAAL
case was argued by East Williston
attorney Elinor Molbegott.
The mid-March completion
of the transfer of the
Laboratory for Experimental
Medicine and Surgery In Primates
from New York University to the
Coulston Foundation, run by longtime
laboratory supplier Frederick
Coulston, was indefinitely delayed
on March 7 by the USDA, pending
the outcome of a probe into the possibility
that the deal was arranged to
retaliate against LEMSIP founder Dr.
Jan-Moor Jankowski, for exposing
Animal Welfare Act violations at the
addiction lab of fellow NYU
researcher Ronald Wood. MoorJankowski
was fired in August 1995
and LEMSIP was closed, several
months after Wood’s work was suspended.
Moor-Jankowski is best
known for beating a 1983 libel suit
filed against him, as editor of the
International Journal of Primatology,
by the Austrian pharmaceutical giant
Immuno AG, over a letter he published
by International Primate
Protection League president Shirley
McGreal. The U.S. Supreme Court
finally ruled in Moor-Jankowski’s
favor in 1991.
Jose Eduardo Saavedra,
19, of El Paso, Texas, was arrested
May 8 on a no-bail warrant for
alleged terrorism, for posting a
March 3 Internet message that read in
full, “Instead of hunting lions in
California, let us declare open season
on State Senator Tim Leslie, his family,
everyone he holds near and dear,
the Cattlemen’s Association, and
anyone else who feels that lions in
California should be killed. I think it
would be great to see this slimeball,
a—hole, conservative moron hunted
down and skinned and mounted for
our viewing pleasure. I would rather
see every right-wing nut like scumface
Leslie destroyed in the name of
political sport, than lose one mountain
lion whose only fault is having to
live in a state with a f——d up jerk
like this s—-tfaced Republican and
his supporters. Pray for his death.
Pray for all their deaths.” Leslie has
introduced three unsuccessful
attempts to repeat the California
Mountain Lion Protection Act, the
most recent of which was thumped by
California voters in a March 29 referendum.
Animal Liberation Front supporters
have posted to online forums
hundreds of similar messages urging
violence in recent months, sometimes
anonymously and sometimes
not, drawing frequent rebuke from
opponents of violent tactics including
ANIMAL PEOPLE.