Card Tricks

By Amy Wilentz

Although the raids took place nearly 500 miles apart, they were staged almost simultaneously and went off without a hitch. At dawn in the leafy, colonial town of Leesburg, Va., local officers, state police and federal agents surrounded two buildings that house the headquarters of Right-Wing Extremist Lyndon LaRouche. In Quincy, Mass., seven FBI agents entered a branch office of Caucus Distributors Inc., a LaRouche-run company, and seized documents. Later the same day a federal grand jury in Boston handed up a 117-count indictment charging ten defendants with obstruction of justice and more than $1 million in credit-card fraud related to fund raising for LaRouche's 1984 presidential campaign. Six of the indicted LaRouche followers were subsequently arrested in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia.

The LaRouchites' "fund raising" technique, the indictment said, consisted of approaching people in airports, shopping centers and post offices in seven cities to solicit contributions and sell subscriptions to such LaRouche publications as Fusion, New Solidarity and Executive Intelligence Review magazines. Donors were encouraged to pay with Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit cards. The card numbers were then recorded on what LaRouche followers called "contact cards," which listed a cardholder's name, address, telephone number and special interests. Later fund raisers used the cards to make further pitches by telephone. Some victims were called 30 times or more, often in the middle of the night. The fund raisers used what the indictment calls "increasingly insistent tones" to ask for loans or donations to the LaRouche campaign organizations. If the solicitations were refused, the indictment alleges, the LaRouchites went ahead anyway and charged unauthorized donations to the victims' credit cards. More than 2,000 unauthorized charges were made, the indictment said; one victim was taken for $8,200.

LaRouche, 64, who called the raids a "dirty trick run as a media stunt," was not indicted. He frequently denies any knowledge of his organization's finances, and he recently agreed to pay a $202,000 judgment to NBC in a damage suit rather than submit to a probe of his personal wealth. Nevertheless, the indictment says LaRouche discussed the credit-card case last year, telling a subordinate, "Just keep stalling, stall and appeal, stall and appeal." At a detention hearing for two of the defendants last week, an FBI agent testified that LaRouche once reportedly said of a prosecutor who was investigating the case, "The s.o.b. does not deserve to live. He should get a bullet between the eyes."

LaRouche, who warned that he would not "submit passively to an arrest," apparently blames his troubles on the Communists: a spokesman claimed Soviet Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev had "demanded the head of LaRouche on a platter" prior to the Iceland minisummit. But his real adversaries are closer to home. The Leesburg raid was almost a community effort: residents, wary of the paranoid strangers in town, provided furtive assistance to investigators, taking down auto-license numbers of LaRouche followers and reporting suspicious behavior. LaRouche has "alienated a lot of the local people," said a police officer. "He called two elderly ladies Communists and dope pushers. These are people who are well respected here." Instead of inciting the Kremlin, LaRouche seems to have stirred up his neighbors. --By Amy Wilentz. Reported by Anne Constable/Washington and B. Russell Leavitt/Atlanta

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington, B. Russell Leavitt/Atlanta