Byline: PAUL SHUKOVSKY P-I reporter
People in Seattle's Roosevelt neighborhood were so afraid of Neo-Nazi Keith Gilbert that even Health Department inspectors got search warrants and brought along a small army of police officers several years ago just to look for rats.
Gilbert - a veteran white supremacist who once bragged about plotting to blow up the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with 1,400 pounds of TNT - was arrested Tuesday by federal agents who say he was peddling machine guns.
Agents removed about 100 firearms from his home, one of many dilapidated homes that Gilbert managed for Seattle landlord Hugh Sisley. Some have accused Gilbert of managing them through fear, intimidation and frivolous lawsuits.
'He was a thug, hired to keep the neighborhood and the tenants and everybody else under control,' said Susan Baker, former president of the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association.
Baker and the neighborhood association were frequently at odds with Sisley and Gilbert over the condition of his dozens of properties around Northeast 65th Street, roughly bounded by Roosevelt Way Northeast and Brooklyn Avenue Northeast.
'He's a bully,' Baker said of Gilbert. 'Very scary. Conducting surveillance throughout the neighborhood. Watching what everybody does. Dogs that are there to strike fear into the hearts of people.' (Seattle Animal Control took Gilbert's German shepherd Blondie away Tuesday.)
'If you complained about the condition of a house,' there were consequences, Baker said. 'And he (Gilbert) had his henchmen, too.'
Sisley did not return calls for comment Tuesday and yesterday. But his attorney, David Vogel, said that Sisley, like everyone else in the neighborhood, was afraid of Gilbert.
Sisley started out decades ago buying up properties by working three jobs at a time, Vogel said. 'He's land-rich, cash-poor. And the way he's been able to pay for it is to rent them out without having to make improvements to the properties.'
Vogel said Sisley typically rents the houses at 'well below the market' rate to a single individual who then sublets rooms or apartments to poor people who are often sick or disabled.
The Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, Vogel said, 'doesn't like the fact that there are people of lower income in the neighborhood.'
Gilbert showed up about 12 years ago, moved into Sisley's housing and 'convinced Hugh that he had a good way to rent out his properties,' said Vogel.
'Keith became the tenant in a lot of these houses and was essentially acting as a de facto manager. And I think that's where some of the problems started.'
Part of the reason Sisley liked working with Gilbert, said Vogel, is that if squatters moved into a home, trashing the place, 'Keith was less tolerant of that.'
It was a Sisley rental home in September 1999 that health inspectors raided with at least seven Seattle police officers who worried about 'an individual who has an extensive and violent criminal history,' according to court documents. The inspectors were looking for rats.
Vogel called Gilbert - who has a lengthy criminal history - 'quite an avid jailhouse lawyer' who used the legal process to deal with everyone from squatters to the neighborhood association.
For example, he sued Baker in 1999 in a federal civil rights action so convoluted that a judge dismissed it for failure to state a claim and forbade Gilbert from filing any new actions against anyone having anything to do with the neighborhood association or anyone who lived near him.
But Gilbert wasn't Sisley's employee, Vogel said. 'He was not hired. He was perhaps enabled by Hugh to use his housing.
'He was not directed by Hugh to do anything against the neighbors. On the other hand, Hugh didn't interfere with him. I think Hugh perceived it to be a symbiotic relationship when in fact it was working against his interest.
'I don't think Hugh ever used strong-arm tactics on people, and I don't think he ever approved of those tactics. I don't know if he believed what he was told (about Gilbert using strong-arm tactics.)
'He has allowed it. But at a certain point, I would say that he was afraid of Keith himself. How do you stop someone like that?
'I wouldn't go so far as to say he was the Frankenstein monster. But at a certain point, I don't think Hugh felt he could stop it - that he had control over Keith.'
A U.S. magistrate will decide tomorrow whether Gilbert, 65, will remain behind bars pending his trial on numerous weapons charges that could send him to jail for the rest of his life if he is found guilty. Two other defendants in the case will also have detention hearings this week.
FBI agents arrested Alen Long, one of the two suspects in the case at large earlier in the week, about 1 p.m. yesterday in Kent. He was staying with a family member.
P-I reporter Paul Shukovsky can be reached at 206-448-8072 or paulshukovsky@seattlepi.com
