Second Break-In of Humboldt DA's House

Pacific Lumber and their spooks step up the campaign against the DA who is trying to bring them to justice

The Humboldt County DA's home was broken into for a second time in a few days yesterday. This comes after his office was burglarized and confidential documents from his office were stolen and later distributed to the media by the PL recall committee campaign manager.

As reported in previous BACH alerts, Humboldt District Attorney Paul Gallegos, is fighting a recall election because he filed a fraud case against Maxxam's Pacific Lumber Company for concealing landslide information during Headwaters deal negotiations in order to get a rate of cut that netted them tens of millions of dollars.

Their annual rate of logging has been identified by eminent scientists as the cause of damage to salmon habitat and downstream land.

This is what the case is about:
In August 1998, Maxxam mortgaged all of Pacific Lumber's timberlands to bondholders, committing PL to a rate of harvest that has already liquidated nearly all of PL's sawlog timber to finance the debt, and siphon hundreds of millions in profits to Houston's Maxxam Corp. To attain a guaranteed high rate of harvest to satisfy the bond debt, false data related to landslide liklihood was submitted to agencies determining details of the Headwaters deal.

This fraud (false data and withheld data) was brought to the attention of the District Attorney' office and as it is required to do,it investigated and put a case together to stop it.That case was filed in February of 2003,a month after Gallegos took office.

Within a month, the response from Pacific Lumber rained down on his head. A recall campaign was launched against DA Paul Gallegos, his detractors complaining that he was "soft on crime". But he had not been in office long enough to develop a record of softness or hardness.

What we knew privately but wasn't publicly exposed until months into the recall campaign was that Maxxam/PL almost completely bankrolled the campaign, contributing almost 95% of over $120,000 pro-recall funds. In fact, the recall only qualified for the March 2004 ballot after Maxxam/PL contributed almost $50,000 towards hiring out-of-state signature gatherers, who were paid $8 per signature and used deceptive tactics (like linking it to the Gov. Gray Davis recall petition) to get people to sign the recall petition.

Meanwhile, the rate of harvest fraudulently awarded is slicing through the wet forest like a huge serrated knife. Most affected right now are Freshwater and Elk River watersheds. Nearly 5 miles of road have already been punched into the area, and this cut is part of a plan to log about 300 acres in upper Freshwater during 2004.

Maxxam must not be allowed to bully elected people out of office.

Please consider making a donation of any amount to help defeat the recall of DA Paul Gallegos for the public outreach they must do to defeat recall as the election approaches.

The website is <http://www.votegallegos.org/>
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Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters (BACH)
Ecology Center
2530 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702
phone: 510 548 3113
email: bach [at] headwaterspreserve.org
http://www.HeadwatersPreserve.org