Ep. 230: Run't Over

And leard loading me on the stretcher to put me in the back of the amulets. And I looked up and the guy attended me. I'd had in federal court before, and I remember looking at my boss. I remember grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him down, and I said, don't leave me.

On this episode, we'll be peeking behind the veil of the same world as we hear a wild story of attempted murder, a high speed chase, illegal drugs, and steaming hot irony, all on America's public lands. The host of our story is an old Bear Grease friend who spent his career as a special agent with the United States Forest Service. He spent time under cover, and in a past life, he was a bricklayer from Southeast Tennessee. His

And I said, why would you be telling me this, and a true Appalachian spirit, he just said, you know you didn't do anything wrong. It was boys in prison are the one that did something wrong. And I can't convince some of these members of the community that you've done nothing wrong.

My name is Klay Nukem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant search for insight and unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places explored.

I'll never forget it. I was on the passioner's side front and it was in a sedan. The agents Drew drove Crown Vicks then and they laid the seat back and the agent from Georgia got in the back and it tore his shirt off.

It's down to his T shirt and would wrap my head.

My head was bleeding, and it's funny how your mind will drift. And I reached up and I felt this real warmth in my ear. This may sound a little crude, but it's funny how your mind works. I'm coming and going. I don't know if I'm gonna pass out or not, but I'll never forget my thoughts were if I'm bleeding out my ear. This is not good. I've seen Daddy put down too many dogs, and you know, Son, this dog has been hit by car, is bleeding out the here. We gotta put it down.

Yeah, I mean you know, you grow up in the South and a round dogs.

I mean, bleeding out the ear is a bad sign.

I mean, I don't mean to make light of that, but that's what was going through my mind at that time.

How fast do you think the truck was going when it hit you?

It probably wasn't going, but I'm gonna say when it excel because it slowed down like it's gonna stop, and it just immediately turned and gassed it.

And I can remember hearing the gravels. I can remember seeing, you.

Know, and it just that that front end and that front tire just clipped me and flip me and it and it raced off.

After that truck hit Russ, it would bust through a roadblock and lead officers on a high speed chase through the smoky mountains of North Carolina, leading into a three day man hunt. What twists and turns in a man's life would lead him into a scenario like this. I think we need to go back to the very beginning.

My name is Russ Arthur.

I was born in nineteen fifty nine in Southeast Tennessee. My parents raised me and two sisters in the Hickson Red Bank area of Tennessee and graduated high school in seventy seven. I did a lot of construction work during high school and during my few years in college did brick block work and always was a passionate turkey hunter. My dad was always a passionate turkey hunter. He was turkey hunting when turkey hunting wasn't cool, and he would

This camp would be the philosophical cradle of Russ's life's work. He was enamored with the men that hunted there, their conversations, and like the bedrock forming at the bottom of an ancient ocean, he developed a foundational appreciation for the land. But I want to go even deeper into Russ's foundations.

My dad was very well respected in the community. He respected the law enforcement. He was a philosopher son, always do the right thing when nobody's looking. He was all about honor, all about integrity. He was a man of many talents. He was a beekeeper, he was a housman at one time with beagles, and rabbit hunting was his thing.

He loved the art of shooting.

And he was a very good father to our family. Anybody who was around he would grain their respect. But he was a true woodsman. He knew everything there was to know about the mountains, not only their history, but he knew every plant species.

He really took.

In everything in those mountains, and he was a self taught naturalist.

At Russ's core, I think you can perceive a genuine and deep appreciation for wild places, stretching a net of knowledge that supersedes a veneer of simply knowing about and hunting on some land. His appreciation is informed by a complex sequence of data points.

It was real.

As this story unfolds, you'll see the extent to which Russ will go to do his job with the Forest Service, and at the heart of it, going back to his father, is a sacred respect wild places.

And I was just infactuated by by their skills, by their turkey call making skills, by the types of tactics they used, and uh just love the mountains.

And I always uh would interact.

With the forest Service as they came through, really admired them, really respected them, and I would always ask them, how did I get a job with you?

How did I get a job with you? Even as a little kid, And they would just always talk to me and be cordial.

And when I got on up in high school, one of them told me, said.

You need to get in college.

Son.

My dad wasn't very high on this, but when I told him I wanted to get a degree in forestry, he he said, son, if I not told you and talk to you enough about trees, so uh, but I'll never forget that. I said, well, day, it's a little more than that. It's a it's a I think it would be a good profession. I just knew I wanted. I want to ride around those green trucks, and I wanted to be part of managing that land that I cared.

So much about.

The things that catch our eyes children, and the decisions we make early in life are critical, often determined the out comes far beyond the site of the time. When I meet people that I respect, I find their formative influences interesting and Russ would never turn his gaze from these early directions that he was looking. But I don't think that it played out the way that he would

For the next two or three years.

Mark Timber with firefighter held the dumb end of an engineer tape on laying out, you know, logging roads, just anything that they had at the lowest grade level. I took it all the time, not knowing which direction my career was going to go. I just enjoyed the diversity of the work. I enjoyed the people, I enjoyed the environment. It was just a I was articled to death.

Then one day Russ literally got a knock on the door from two Forest Service agents from North Carolina.

They said, look, we've got a job opening coming into North Carolina. We want you to apply. And I said, well, guys, what is it? And they said it's a full time law enforcement officer job, and for service is just now getting into these positions. Most of the positions are you know, you'll do ten percent law and ten percent fire and twenty percent recreation, and you know, thirty percent temper marking. But this one's full time law enforcement, and we think you'd be a good fit.

Prior to this, the Forest Service hadn't heavily dealt in law enforcement, but the need was now rising from full time officers. He applied for the job and got it.

I've always wondered who I beat out for that job, because man, I didn't have that much experience, And.

They finally told me I was the only applicant.

That made you feel good, That made me feel real good.

Sometimes just showing up is all that it takes. And to go back to the guys that told him to apply. Sometimes we aren't able to see the potential in ourselves and it takes someone else to spot it. That's why it's critical to surround yourself with selfless, honest people. In July nineteen eighty five, Russ would relocate to the mountains of rural western North Carolina, but he had no way to predict the direction of his career would go.

That duty station in North Carolina. It was pretty remote area. It is in Robbinsville.

I think at the time Robinsville was seventy or something percent US for service and the rest of it was private. So there there was a lot of animosity there against the Forest Service, and that goes back to some of the things that TVA did with Fontana in the flooding of homes and things. But they just weren't a good fan of the government back in the eighties.

This is the perfect entry point to understanding the full story and all its twists and turns of Russ with the bleeding ear in the crown vic you're gonna want to pay attention and don't get too comfortable. Here's the whole story.

Back in nineteen eighty six, while working in Robinsville, North Carolina, you know, again with a Forest Service law enforcement my first position. There was an unusual group came to the National Forest and Robinsville was a very quiet, very calm, very southern type small town. You know, one red light, two places to eat, one small hotel, just good, easy living, very proud. People loved their community, loved their National Forest.

This community.

This group had become well known in the nineteen seventies, traveling across the country gathering in the name of world peace. However, every place they went to they'd set up in national forest, intending to protest the government through their right to gather without a permit. However, the Forest Service required gatherings of over seventy five people to have a permit, and thousands were coming, so there was some head button with the

It was kind of like a freak show, if you will. For the locals. They hear about it, they don't want to drive.

Up and see it.

Well, one Friday night, we for Service along with the state, set up a roadblock just to check for DUI DOI checkpoint and one of the curves that went up and down there because we were now allowing vehicles to drive up and down, but they couldn't take equipment in and out now, So we've got a roadblock going on, and I'll digress a little bit. The fall before that, I had a run in with a young man up there that suspected of hunting berry legal.

And when I got up.

With him in a remote area up there, he had a rifle, but it wasn't a large caliber and he claimed he was only squirrel hunting, so I cited him. I think it was a forty or fifty dollars collateral citation for hunting squirrels out of season on Wildlife Managinary, And that type of collateral ticket was the lowest level of enforcement action that you can take other than a warning, and he can mail it in if it's paid on time, it don't even go on your record, so it wasn't

And I was what called the point.

Person, and I turned my flashlight on and stepped out, held my hand up to stop the vehicle, and it immediately accelerated and turned toward me and ran over me, and it caught right side of my leg, flipped me over in the ditch, head hit the hit the gravel road, and I just I went out for a few few seconds.

The vehicle's gone.

The next thing I know, the agent out of Ashville and when the agents out of Georgia that was there loaded me up in the back their vehicle was taking me trying to get me to the hospital. Of course, immediately, you know, we had five or six marked units at that roadblock, and I can remember in that ditch, laying there just seeing them go by, blue lights blazing where this happened was probably running wide open more than an hour of the closest hospital, and it's back for the

The hospital was in Bryson City.

You know, if you know anything about Western Carolina, and that's you know, that's a pretty long way from Robbinsville. But they did have ammelet service in Robinsville. So he's communicating with the ambulets. I'm coming up one twenty nine. They almost met each other, and it was almost erected meeting each other. And I'm still just in it, just can't figure out what's going on. And they're loading me on this stretcher to put me in the back of

Move all over.

I think the main thing keeping Russ's injuries from being much worse was simple. He was six foot two in the neighborhood of two hundred and forty pounds in his late twenties. He was tough, but he was bleeding out his ear, and that's never good. But an even more interesting question is what madness would cause someone to think that they could get away with this or even want to do it. But then the situation escalated even more.

They came and took statements from me. The State Borough Investigation got involved, and that's when I learned that there was still.

A man hunt. There are three people in that truck, and if you know anything about that area.

Highway one twenty nine goes from Maryville all the way up through the mountain around by the Smokies, comes around the bottom of Fontana Dam and people call it the Dragon's Tail. It's a very windy road, but that's where they were fleeing to.

And it was ironic.

My old boss, the one that first men towards me into getting into law enforcement, was the one right behind them.

And if you knew less, you'd know that they're probably not going to get away from him. And I learned all this, of course after the fact.

The truck went around so many of those curves, it couldn't hold a curve like a crown vick. Literally he was pushing them all accounts that I heard later. So these guys knew what they were doing. All three of them were locals from that area, very avid.

Hunters, and it all of.

A sudden ditched and they all three jumped out and ran into the smokies.

He was able to catch one. It was a juvenile. It was just a passenger. So you've got one call that's a juvenile that you can't prosecute. And there was a huge man hunt.

Stay of Tennessee got involved because This was closest Tennessee state line. State of North Carolina got involved with their highway patrols and they set up roadblocks trying to catch these guys. So three days hadn't caught them. And let me get this straight. It was one of the guys who was still in there. Dad came to the authorities and said, need to talk.

I know where they're at.

I'll get them to come out on their own, if you'll get rid of everybody.

They've got a spot.

Over there to the illegal hunt camp in the smokies that they're holed up in, and only I know where it's at. Y'all back out of here. I don't want them shot, I don't want them hurt. I'll go get them within two days, they'll they'll turn himself in. And evidently this man did a good job of convincing the authorities that that that would happen, and he held true to his word and they brought the guys out, and one of.

Them was the guy that I had written the squirrel hunting ticket with m M.

The squirrel hunter. Why did he do this? They were about to find out why in federal court.

Him and his brother were prosecuted and he got three years. He was not the driver, he was the passenger. His brother was the driver, and he got three years in federal prison.

And the brother that was the driver or the past the.

Paler hunter, the squirrel hunter.

The squirrel hunter got three years.

He got three years in federal prison.

We were able to find a person in that encampment that actually came to the courts and testified.

They were on their way up.

They stopped that truck as that truck was coming down to the roadblock, and they told the driver, you all need.

To be careful.

The Forest Service has a roadblock set up down there, and I don't want anybody get in trouble. The passenger, which was the scraw hunter, leaned over the driver and looked at the guy and said, do you know Russ Arthur And this guy said yeah, said.

Is he down there?

And they said he said yeah, And he then got back, you know, leaned back in and got in the middle of the seat and told his brother said come on, it's time for him to die.

Wow.

This came out in federal courts.

This came out in the testimony.

So both found guilty, they go to prison, and well that was a very tough time in my life and my career. I mean, it really was, because he just didn't know what would happen next. And about six months after that, one of the members that family called me at one o'clock in the morning, and these guys are both in prison. He said, need to talk to you. And I knew this guy and I called him my name.

And they didn't like it. They were not law enforcement.

They were very, very supportive of everything, and I mean two of the best guys you've ever ever known, and they they had my back anytime. He said, well, just be careful and let us know when you clear from there.

And again this is back before cell phones.

And you know, so I got there fifteen minutes before I told him i'd be there, part my truck a different place where I told him my park and walked around and did surveillance of that area before he pulled in.

You know.

So he pulls in, gets out, we have a conversation and it was he was sober. He just said, there's a couple of guys down there that's talking about, you know, does some harm to you. I just want to warn you you need to be careful if you get any calls at night. And I said, why would you be telling me this, and true Appalachian spirit, he just said, you know, you didn't do anything wrong.

These boys in prison are the ones that did something wrong.

And I can't convince some of these members of the community that you've done nothing wrong. So a lot of respect up for that gentleman. And we talked for about an hour there. Then he went on his way, and when he got in the truck and left, my two supervisors I heard a rustle in the bushes came out and they each had their personal shotguns.

Said just want to let you know we had you back.

You didn't know they were there.

No, Wow.

No, So those guys weren't the bosses at that time, weren't lawn.

Form No, they were just they were They were professional foresters and running running the district.

They just wanted to make sure that Wow, that I was covered. They would lose their job today.

There's an old saying about true friendship, stating there's no greater love than someone who's willing to lay their life down for a friend. These guys didn't have to do that, but it sure seems like they were willing to defend Russ at all costs. Time passes, things settled down, and Russ's career moves on. He's actually relocated to another state, back to Tennessee. But then one day he gets a

The guy was just mean.

So he goes on to prison and him and his brother both Then I fast forward and I moved to Tennessee, and you know, I'm sitting in Tennessee and I get a call from the authorities over there that said they need my help. They had not yet hired a new officer to fill my place in Robbinsville. Can I come over and help them with this huge marijuana operation? You know, you know the area and you know the players.

Can you do this? I said, yeah, that'd be me fun.

So me and the agent from Carolina went over there and we did a recon of.

The area and we found a huge operation in a clear.

Cut huge How did you find it?

One of our timber markers checking some timber inventory had had found it and it was in a pretty remote area. So we laid a plan to surveil it, and he said, you know what we'll do. We can do this with four people. He said, if you can get another officer, we'll drop you off and off. We found ad vantage point where I could watch the side of that hill with binoculars and a camera of the zoom lens. You

Wait till they all go in there and then catch them on the way.

Out, exactly.

And you just figured you could find the vehicles a lot of roads around or something.

Yeah, not that many roads. Yeah.

So me and another officer were sitting there watching and three guys come in. I'm looking at them through binoclars and I'm watching them and they're picking up plants and they're putting it.

It's like they went to work. You know.

They had a huge potting area that they had the plants and pots, and the plants were eight to ten inches.

Tall or taller.

And they would take a plant they had already had pre dug holes and they'd put it in there and they'd water and they'd go get another on that right, and they had I think it's fifteen hundred plants they were going to do this way. And I'm watching these guys and I don't recognize any of them, and I radiod my boss. I said, he said, we found the vehicle, and we're going to set a surveillance on their vehicle.

You know.

So those three have worked about an hour now, and three more show up.

So now we got six.

Well, I started logging in and we started naming them all.

You know, number one wearing.

This type of ball hat, this shirt, these pants, and so I gave a good description. Boss, he's writing that same description down, so when I'm talking, we can chronologe keep up with.

Okay, number one is going to get water.

Number seven or number six is now putting fertilizer.

Number you know.

So we confirmed what the descriptions of and had them all one through six, and I still was so frustrated because I didn't know any of them. So they'd been working in there about four hours, been there some of them since I Right at daylight and I look up and here comes another one and I put the binoclars up and it was the old boy that ran over me. And I thought, I cannot believe two things. Number one, he's out of prison.

You didn't know he was out of prison.

Well I knew, I hadn't even really thought about it.

But you know, how long is this after about three years and always as recognizable, I mean boom, there he is well. In the meantime, the agent out of the road had to call in for other help because now not only did we have one vehicle to do surveillance I want to take down.

We had two.

Vehicles and we just had a third, and they all parked about a half a mile from each other. So they set teams, got teams, got other law enforcement personnel around where we could take them down at the vehicle.

They finished their work.

And they packed up their stuff and they started down this trail back down to the main road, and I radio down.

You know, they're coming out.

So we're basically following them, but at a distance where we can't be obviously heard or seen. And they start to hear them on the radio. Hey, we've got two here, we got three here. I got two more here. And then I'm.

Waiting to hear the one. And then I hear his name.

It was a wildlife officer, great friend of mine, still friends with him, that actually arrested him at his vehicle. And I come out of the woods and my boss is there with the other six, and I said, can I go up and see this gentleman?

He looked at me, he said, you sure can't. So the Wildlife.

Officered radio down and said, just to let you know, I've read him his rights on the miranda, and he's telling me that he was turkey scouting, that he don't know why he's being arrested, and he wants.

To be turned loose. So I walk up to where he's at.

Keep in mind, I've got full cameo gear on, face paint on, I've got a camera with a thirty five millimeters zoom.

And I walked up there.

And when I walked up there and looked at him, he's handcuffed behind the back and he looked at me, and I just just I could kill you look in his eye and he grinned, and he says, I was turkey hunting and you can't prove anything different for us. And I just sat down and I said, well, Bud, I said, it's going to be a long day for you. I set my pack down and I pulled the camera out and I set it down on the hood of the car. I said, you're going to be a movie star.

And so wow.

And it turns out those other six, he met in prison in Florida and e convinced them he had a good place to grow marijuana. So he goes to prison again. And he had a very very criminal lived life. When he got out of prison, he was trying convicted for some child molestation, uh murder, and was convicted.

Wait a minute after he got a prison first time.

No, the second time from the from the marijuana charge he went to.

He served a prison sentence for this marijuana charge, got out, got out, and then.

Yes, a child molestation. Then he murdered a guy on National Forest. It was a controversial case I understand where he claimed that it was an argument over a card game and they were friends, but basically beat him to death with some firewood and a remote campsite. And but he since passed on. I got word a few years ago that he had had died.

So wow, how old a guy was he when he died? I mean he died early.

He was probably in his fifties.

Okay, when he got out of prison the second time, I mean you would have been like highly aware of the sky.

Oh yeah.

But did he come back to the community.

Oh yeah, that's where he got in all the trouble so, but but I wasn't living there anymore. Oh you see, I since gone Tennessee, then Tennessee to Arkansas.

So my career had.

That's a wild story, man, it was.

It was a crazy sequence of events.

It's hard to understand how people could be so warped, so dark. I guess when I hear about crazy people. First of all, I'm grateful for many of you and a bunch of people I'll never know that had upbringings of which they had no control over or earned, where men and women in their lives taught them right from wrong. Our society has a lot more great people than crazy people. This guy was missing something.

The only other thing with that, and there's two or three other wildlife officers from that area that I think, if we're interviewed, would say the same thing is that it's just a mean person. You know, you in law enforcement, you try to develop a sixth sense by reading people.

I mean you have to.

It's like you would with a I don't mean these people are dogs, but it's like you would with a dog.

How close can I get?

Or you know, if you're around dogs enough, you know you know where its space is and you might not ever seen that dog before.

You can look that eye and see it. See how that tale is done, how they acting? Are they sidewaysing to you? You know, people are no different, So you try to develop that.

And and I can remember telling the probation officer the first time he went to prison, I said, you better really take a hold on this one, because he's he's dangerous.

That first time you met him in the squirrel woods. How old was he.

He was probably early twenties. How old were you late twenties?

Did that first encounter with him? Could you tell he was Yeah, this guy was trouble.

Yeah, And and something else that I tried to do with him. I had all authority to seize his gun that day, but I didn't didn't want to.

It'll be overbearing. I never dealt with him before.

And I tried to explain to her, look, man, just can't be doing it in oner to prove to you that, you know, I'm not that bad a person.

I'm not going to take it again.

Really, So you you even show him a little bit of mercy, and he was still that embittered against you that he was. He wanted to kill you that day. What comes over somebody that that think the answer is that these people were just crazy. But to be at a roadblock with five wildlife officers with vehicles, to think that they could run you over and get away, I mean where they where they high, where they on, were they on drugs?

Where they Well that will never know, because you know it's three days before they surface.

Yeah, I mean what they're just that crazy, I mean that impulsive. You'd think if I mean, if you really wanted to kill you, there'd have been much easier ways to kill you. I guess. I guess crazy people are just that's why they're crazy. Bizarre, man, do you think particularly wildlife law enforcement, these guys that are embedded in these communities and in some ways they're they're not like standard police in that there's not as many of them. You know, there might be like one, one or two

Well, you know, I guess it could. It could kind of be geographical. I wasn't alive during this era, but you can look back in some of the histories and it's always intrigued me of the Moonshine days. Yeah, so there's been a long history in kind of the South, if you will.

Of I don't want to say retaliation, but resentment.

Yeah, and as far as you know, conservation officers, I.

Don't know if there's that many more incidences or.

Not, but you have to be a lot more aware that there could be.

Because you're working environment, you're by yourself, you're.

By yourself, You're you're twenty miles down a gravel road. You may or may not have radio, sir, And even in this day and age, I can take you to several places within thirty minutes or right here where you won't have Yeah, you know, so you definitely have to have that tactical mindset, you know, or something could happen. Crazy time in my life, I remember my dad coming over to the hospital. He was first one I saw when I woke up, and of course he was trying to make light of it.

Tell me he's glad it hit me in the head. I should be okay, typical dad.

Yeah, that truly was a wild story. On the next episode, we'll hear about the last half of Russ's career with the Forest Service, which will lead this old Tennessee country boy to some far off wild places, including an unbelievable story about working undercover and then an illegal elk hunt in Yellowstone National Park. From working in the Western US to flying across the oceans to train an international wildlife task force, this next AP episode is not gonna be