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operation chainsmoker 251Billy, hours away at the Lummi Reservation in Bellingham, got thecall: “The Landing is being raided by the federal firearms and tobaccopeople!”Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosivesseized more than fifty thousand cartons of cigarettes from thesmoke shop that day. “They confiscated everything, cleaned the wholeplace out,” Billy recalls. “I told everybody that the Landing is beingraided. At that same time, they were raiding the Swinomish Tribe.”“They seized between one and two million dollars worth of cigarettes,”Adams estimates. “They confiscated about one half milliondollars in cash from the smoke shop and from the safe at home. . . .They went to Billy’s niece, Alison Gottfriedson’s house, at gunpoint,and took the granddaughters in their pajamas out on the front lawn.Alison and Hank Gottfriedson were [both] under gunpoint and underarrest out on the lawn. And then [they] took Hank Gottfriedson intothe house, just to help locate things so that they wouldn’t destroy thehouse altogether, hunting for things.”“They scared the heck out of my grandkids,” Alison recalls. “Theytook both the computers and they trashed the whole house.”Billy says the federal raid violated a treaty right to trade freely onIndian land. “We always contend that we don’t pay tax. We are exemptfrom any tax, state tax. What the feds did is they come down on theLanding using state law. They made the raid on the Landing based oncharges of not paying tax, laundering money. We’re renegades, andthe Landing puts 108 people to work every day, that’s the school andthe smoke shop.”“We didn’t have no compact with the state of Washington? We’dbeen negotiating for two years on a compact with the state of Washington!”the elder says in exasperation.Adams says at the time of the raid, the Frank’s Landing IndianCommunity had indeed entered into discussions with the WashingtonState Department of Revenue to resolve outstanding issuessurrounding cigarette sales. “We were meeting episodically, either at