Big Bean Raid

Hearings for a farmer hero

The witness had admittedly taken the law into his own hands and led a daring raid on court-protected property. Nonetheless, when he was sprung from jail on a temporary pass last week to testify in Washington on ways that farmers can be hurt by bankruptcy laws, Senators and Congressmen crowded around to shake his hand. To farmers in the dusty "bootheel" area of southeastern Missouri, and indeed to farmers all over the country, he is a hero, fighting a battle for the oppressed against unjust law. And what for? Soybeans.

Back in 1979, Farmer Wayne Cryts, 35, of Puxico, Mo. (pop. 833), deposited his 31,000-bu. crop of soybeans, then worth $190,000, in the Ristine elevator, 60 miles away. In exchange he received warehouse receipts, which he used to get a price-support loan of $140,000 from the federal Commodity Credit Corp. Cryts intended to store the beans until the price rose enough to make it profitable to sell them. But in August 1980, the owners of the elevator went bankrupt. Cryts feared that his beans would be sold and the money thrown into a pool on which he would have only one of dozens of competing claims. That has happened in many other cases of elevator bankruptcies. The litigation of those claims might take years, and if he ever got any money, it would be too late: he would be unable to pay his debts and might lose his farm. That, Cryts thought, "just wasn't right." Whatever the law might say, those beans were his.

As a leader of the militant American Agriculture Movement and a scion of the television age, Cryts knew what to do. He held a press conference in January 1981 to announce that if the beans were not turned over to him by Feb. 16, he would go get them. Some 3,000 farmers from Pennsylvania to California poured into Missouri's bootheel to help. On Feb. 18, Cryts led a caravan of 78 trucks, ranging from pickups to 18-wheelers, along Highway 60 to the padlocked elevator, where the group confronted a line of federal marshals and FBI agents.

It was not much of a confrontation. A marshal asked Cryts if he intended to remove the beans by force. As TV cameras whirred, Cryts replied, "I intend to remove my private property." Then the marshals and FBI agents, who made no secret of their sympathy for Cryts, obligingly stood aside while a tinworker from Kansas City jimmied a hole in the elevator's sheet-metal wall. With the marshals watching, the farmers spent two days hauling out Cryts' beans. When the farmers were finished, they repaired the sheet metal, repainted the elevator wall and neatly swept the grounds. Farmers around the country have since sold the beans on the open market, sending Cryts the proceeds. It seems unlikely that he will earn a profit: all the cash is going to pay his legal expenses, which by now are huge.

The trustee of the bankrupt warehouse brought Cryts before a federal grand jury in Missouri on a charge of theft of property under the protection of a bankruptcy court. The grand jury refused to indict Cryts, but the trustee then haled him into bankruptcy court. Federal Judge Charles W. Baker, who is hearing the bankruptcy case against the elevator, granted Cryts immunity against any further proceedings if he would divulge the names of farmers who had helped him stage the raid. Cryts refused, pleading the Fifth Amendment. Judge Baker then ordered Cryts and his family to pay $300,000 in damages to the trustee and sent the farmer to jail until he would disclose the names.

Cryts had served 17 days in the Pope County detention center in Russellville, Ark., when Kansas Senator Robert Dole, chairman of a Senate judiciary subcommittee on the courts, got him released last week on a three-day pass, later extended to five days. The handsome, deceptively mild-mannered bean farmer testified before a congressional committee on behalf of bills that would give farmers a priority claim on goods stored in bankrupt warehouses. The fate of those bills is uncertain, and so is that of Cryts: he went back to jail on Friday. Meanwhile, he has become a farmland paladin. His home town of Puxico has sprouted yellow ribbons, like those displayed for the Iran hostages, and the crowbar used to break open the elevator wall has been auctioned off for $5,000 as a memento of the Great Soybean Raid. Cryts is totally unrepentant. Said he, testifying last week: "We believe there's more justice in this country than there is any place [else] in the world. But, you know, justice is not always brought and set in your lap. Sometimes you just have to stand up and reach for it."

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