Fred Lee Crisman

[David Guyatt]

...Any ideas about the 'gypsies'?...

This is an important question and one very much misunderstood in the bigger Crisman picture.

When Crisman moved back to his home town of Tacoma, Washington, in 1966, another old friend he got in touch with was Miller Stevens who was a Gypsy. What followed is a good case study of how Crisman operated, and I think there is much between the lines that one can speculate on.

According to the way Crisman explains it Miller Stevens asked for his help in getting an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) plan approved for the Gypsies. Here are a few quotes from Chapter 3 in Crisman's book Murder of a City:

Miller [Stevens] knew that I had been a school teacher and administrator and he was aware that I knew something about the Federal Aid to Education programs. He had contacted me to tell me that his people needed special help and that he could get no person to listen to his pleas. …I assumed that the Office of Economic Opportunity, in its great wisdom, had arranged to take care of the Gypsy peoples of this nation as well as they categorized the rest of the minority peoples. Negroes, Number 1, Indians, Number 2, Latin-Americans, Number 3…and so on down their ever wise and never wrong ladder! Miller insisted that the Gypsy peoples were being left out completely. I was again amazed… (p. 17)

[and here, I believe is a good example of the access in high places that Crisman had all over the country]

I called Jim Wickwire, in Senator Henry Jackson’s [D-Washington] office and Jim told me that he would check and see if Miller knew what he was talking about. …I soon had some letters from Jim Wickwire and several calls from him that expressed surprise that the all-knowing OEO had little knowledge or information on the Gypsy peoples as they now exist in the U.S. …I wrote a complete research paper on the Gypsy tribes in the U.S. with some notes on their way of life and their problems with public education… I finally wrote a complete education plan for the local Gypsy people and it was given a grudging $6700 to see if it could work. The program was a success, but was not renewed. (pp. 17-18)

Whether Crisman was motivated by altruism or friendship could be questioned, but what does seem clear is that he used this project as just another weapon in the local political war that (it appears) he had instigated and managed.

I walked away from the Gypsy project after having charged Miller not one penny for the long hours and research done for his favor. I was later accused by this same team Lee & Jeffords as having made a lot of money from the Gypsy program. By that time it did not worry me for I had been assured that most of the local politicians knew Lee as a liar and Jeffords as a cheap hippie-in-residence at the [Tacoma News] Tribune. Any knock from them was a boost in most quarters of the city. (p. 20)

For me, one of the most amazing things Micheal Riconosciuto said to Kenn Thomas in the 1996 prison interview was this: "Crisman was a master at emotional contagion. An absolute master at it…" (Maury Island UFO, p. 281)

Ron Williams

On Gypsies it may be of interest that Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler's tame Satanist and leading figure in the SS Ahnenerbe, claimed to be the "King of the Gypsies".

For more on him see Wiki HERE - although a fairly recent book about him (the title of which I now forget) has far more relevant details.