Ronald Griesacker

Ronald Arthur Griesacker (born June 14, 1956) is a former resident of Saint Mary's, Kansas who was arrested March 20, 1998 in Shady Grove, Oregon on federal bank and mail fraud charges.

Griesacker is known for his role in promoting common law court activity in the Midwest, and for affilations with Christian Patriot groups, the Republic of Texas separatist group, Freemen's advocates and the Washitaw Nation.

Griesacker is a former employee of the Kansas Department of Corrections. Sometimes he is confused with another former Kansan, Morris Wilson. Testimony at the federal trial of Terry Nichols suggested Wilson was in a southern Kansas jail at the time Timothy McVeigh is alleged to have assembled the bomb used to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A retired Army NCO testified at the trial that he cancelled a fishing trip to Geary State Lake after encountering a surly man resembling Wilson among a group of men assembled around a flat-bed truck laden with large sacks the weekend before the bombing.

Nichols' defense attorneys subpoenaed a Kansas jailer to rebut prosecution documents that suggested Wilson was in jail that day, but the defense never called the man to the witness stand.

Griesacker was sentenced in February 1999 to 57 months in federal prison without parole on nine counts of bank fraud, one count of mail fraud and a conspiracy charge stemming from $2 million in worthless checks he'd passed off as government drafts.

He was released from a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, eighteen months early on May 30, 2002, and concluded his parole on Sept. 27, 2002.

Some of the investigators, lawyers and militiamen who helped bring Griesacker to justice say he got out of prison so soon he must have cut a secret deal with the government, perhaps years earlier. Some call him "John Doe No. 3."

After the Oklahoma City bombing, Griesacker traveled among anti-government compounds in Montana, Missouri, Kansas and Texas, encouraging them to pick fights with the government just before each compound fell to government investigations or sieges. Griesacker made sure each group left paper trails detailing their illegal activities, ensuring successful prosecutions of extremists, some skeptics assert.

Griesacker may have been the decade's most-successful anti-terrorism government informant: His anti-government buddies were sent to prison for decades. What's really odd may be that Griesacker went to prison at all.