The police had no right to be there, he said, as they were actually on territory belonging to another country — his office was the Sealandic consulate in Spain. The passport was superficially quite legit, with a rubber coating and foil-stamped seals, and it gave the officers some pause when considering how to handle the arrest.

Increasing Boys Prostitution in Indonesia

Far from being a diplomat, Trujillo Ruiz was one of the prime movers and shakers in a gang of scam artists operating throughout the world. At least 20 fake diplomatic passports, hundreds more blank passports, and 2, official documents were seized in the raids, as were two vehicles with Sealand diplomatic license plates that had been escorted through Madrid by Spanish police on more than one occasion.

While the Versace incident in had alarmed them, the Bates family had been oblivious to the extent of the problem with Sealand passports. Michael scratched his chin. Sealand did have a website, but it was in its infancy. The site was how he had left it. He then searched around and turned up a Sealand site with a much more manageable domain name: Lo and behold, it was a website purporting to be the official mouthpiece of Sealand, and one could indeed buy a number of Sealandic documents.

Spanish investigators unraveled the web and found that the scams associated with the fake Sealand paperwork involved more than 80 people from all over world. The scams were impressively wide-ranging: We knew nothing at all about it or the people involved. They intended to sell the arms to Sudan, which was under embargo by many governments of the world for being a terrorist state.

How disgusting can you get? Trujillo Ruiz reportedly first learned about Sealand while working in Germany for a man named Friedbert Ley, who had launched his own Sealand fan website in and asked Trujillo Ruiz to set up a Spanish branch office of the Sealandic government. When confronted by investigators about the fake passports, Trujillo Ruiz conceded that they were made in Germany but said he had been appointed acting head of state by the royal family of Sealand and been given authorization to issue Sealandic passports.

Roy Bates was of course fine. The Germans had once visited the younger Trujillo Ruiz in Spain, and they appeared to be a bad influence on him, the father said. I n the early s, Roy Bates had prepared to turn the fort into a much larger ministate with a group of Belgians and Germans who had offered to go into business with him. The Germans were led by Alexander Gottfried Achenbach, said to be a former diamond dealer who was planning on a quiet retirement raising rabbits in Belgium until the Sealand opportunity sucked him back in.

The Germans were remarkable busybodies, drawing up a constitution and legal decrees and bombarding embassies all over the world with requests for diplomatic recognition. Nevertheless, the petitioning continued in earnest and their zeal was infectious. Roy Bates had long intended to make the fort into a profitable business, and the plans he and the Germans cooked up were grandiose. Back in Sealand, however, Michael was working on the fort alone when a helicopter landed.

Out came some of their German associates, who claimed Roy had given them possession of the fort. Michael was extremely uneasy about the situation — and completely outnumbered. Roy and Joan were similarly uneasy when a friend back in England alerted them that he had seen a helicopter hovering near Sealand. Their sinking feeling was justified. Michael tried to wrench himself free, his hair falling in his eyes as he was dragged into the room and shut behind a steel door. The only possible way out was a porthole window, but it was far too small for an adult to fit through.

Michael was left in the room for three days, keeping himself warm by wrapping himself in a Sealandic flag.

• Helena's Story: ‘After rape and abuse, selling sex gave me a sense of power’?
• Connect. Discover. Share.?
• what are other gay dating site similar to adam4adam.
• Why I Answered My Dad’s Gay Sex Ad?

Eventually, the captors threw Michael onto a boat, which deposited him in the Netherlands, with no money and no passport. A sympathetic skipper helped him get back to England, where he linked back up with his parents. But Michael explained his ordeal. Holding the Fort. The family quickly decided that the only possible response was to recapture the fort.

They gathered some rough-and-tumble friends and a few guns, and enlisted the talents of a pilot friend who had flown helicopters in a James Bond film. The plan was to fly to the fort, rappel down ropes, and retake the Principality by force. Attacking at dawn, they descended from the sky, fired a single shot from a sawed-off shotgun, and tossed the captors into the brig. A tribunal was established to try the invaders. Britain shrugged its shoulders when asked to intervene, saying the fort was not on its property.

The Germans retreated back home after the failed coup and established the Sealandic government-in-exile, a dark mirror version of the Principality that persists to the present day. T he government-in-exile disavowed any role in the late s Spanish passport scam. They were arrested when they tried to cross into Italy.

The money had in fact come from a gambling enterprise in Poland, but it was an aboveboard operation. Did we recognize these passports or not? For a time in , after Slovenia was briefly caught up in the Bosnian war, many countries refused to recognize our nation. Achenbach was 79 when he filed the lawsuit in , and he succumbed to old age in the middle of the litigation at age The strange legal and financial quagmire was a fitting final chapter in the life of someone who had spent his whole life involved in dubious ways to get money.

Increasing Boys Prostitution in Indonesia

Today, however, the Principality does offer a legitimate way to become a citizen of Sealand. The Bates family sells royal titles, an official business whose proceeds go only to funding the honest initiatives of the true Sealandic government. Costs vary: Prince Roy and Princess Joan passed into the next realm in and , respectively, but the country is going strong more than five decades after it was founded. Michael takes only intermittent trips out to the fort these days, but Sealand is always occupied by at least one armed caretaker, lest any of the events of its bellicose history repeat themselves.

The government-in-exile is still going strong as well, led by Prime Minister Johannes W. Seiger since a constitutional amendment transferred power from Achenbach in Seiger asked this writer if I could put him in touch with Donald Trump to help him with his quest, canceling further contact when I was unable to do so.

Fifty years ago, John Trudell overcame tragedy to become the national voice for Native Americans—and a model for a new generation of activists.

H e sat at the same table each evening, sometimes with lighting and sometimes without, a cigarette often in hand, a guest always by his side. In the background, the sound of waves rolling against the rocks and the stuttering of a backup generator were constants. Then, with a crackly yet true radio connection, streaming through the wires from an unthinkable place — Alcatraz Island — he began speaking in a calm, determined voice. The nation was listening. In the Pacifica Radio Archives, located in a modest brick building in North Hollywood, you can hear what hundreds of thousands of Americans heard on those evenings.

File through the cassettes and you will find more than a dozen tapes labeled with a single word: Each is followed by a date, anywhere from December to August But these were not simply programs about Alcatraz, that island in the notoriously frigid San Francisco Bay that was home to a federal prison until it closed in Rather, they were broadcast from the former prison building itself, from a small cell without heat and only a lone generator for power rumbling in the background.

By the winter of , Trudell could be found in that austere cell, speaking over the rush of waves in a composed Midwestern accent.

Recommended For You

Why would the FBI compose its longest dossier about a broadcaster speaking from a rocky island a mile offshore? What was Trudell saying that frightened them so much? Trudell was advocating for Native American self-determination, explaining its moral and political importance to all Americans.

On air, he often revealed the innumerable ways the government was violating Native American rights: He imagined a future in which equality — between different American cultures, and between all people and the earth itself — would become a reality. And for the first time, non—Native American communities were listening. More than , people tuned in to Pacifica stations in California, Texas and New York to hear his weekly broadcast. At just 23 years old, with long brown hair and hanging earrings, Trudell had one thing the FBI could not stop: The organization pointed to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which provided that all surplus federal land be returned to native tribes.

It had been unoccupied since President Kennedy closed the federal prison in By inhabiting the 12 acres of Alcatraz, IOAT hoped to set a precedent for the reclamation of hundreds of thousands of unclaimed acres across the United States. But there was an obstacle: That all changed on the night of November Under the cover of darkness and a dense blanket of fog, 79 activists from more than 20 tribes sailed from Sausalito across the frigid bay and settled on the island.

The Indians have landed! A gathering was held that night at 2 a. Governing teams were also established.

Cairns gay couple Mark Newton and Peter Truong arrested

Onshore allies knew the landing had succeeded when they saw a bright yellow Morse code message blinking through the mist: J ohn Trudell was not on those initial voyages. At the time, he had just returned from deployment in Vietnam, enrolled in San Bernardino Valley College, and moved in with his girlfriend, Fenicia Lou Ordonez. When he learned of the landing on Alcatraz, he suggested they join in. Expecting to join for only a few weeks, they packed sleeping bags, headed six hours north, and hitched a ride across the emerald bay on one of the IOAT-operated vessels, many of which were typically used for fishing and shipping.

What was once a treacherous journey with fierce Coast Guard resistance was now readily accessible, but not because the government had become any more benevolent. Fearing a public backlash, federal authorities called off the Coast Guard from intervening in these voyages. Soon after docking on the island, Trudell attended the daily island meeting of IOAT leaders and tribal heads. He pointed out that if they truly wanted to make a case for the Native American right to reclaim unused land, they urgently needed to reshape the narrative.

On his drive to the Bay Area, Trudell had seen national papers like The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle running stories portraying the occupation as a Native American theft — rather than a reclamation of what was stolen from them.

'They were looking for you'

He asked himself: December 26, For the next 30 minutes, Trudell led conversations with Native American activists, spiritualists and students — many of whom were living on the island, visiting as volunteers, or ferrying supplies. It was called Radio Free Alcatraz , and Trudell typically began episodes by describing challenges on the island.

There were many: Alcatraz had shaky electricity, a dearth of clean water, and it was frequently hit by strong offshore storms. And Saturday, we were stranded on the island because of bad weather. Despite these immediate challenges, Trudell — often clad in a wide-collared button-down underneath an emblazoned leather jacket — spoke both with the equanimity of a captain reporting to headquarters and the kindness of a good friend.

In an interview with KPFA host Al Silbowitz in December , Trudell sketched a portrait of life on the island and outlined the purpose of the occupation. This struggle was not unique to this moment. It was experienced daily by native tribes everywhere.