Project 7 case reaches satisfying end

Six people notified court they will plead guilty.

There's something anticlimactic, but reassuring, about the resolution of six criminal cases related to the Project 7 militia group.

The last of the six people charged have notified the federal government that they intend to plead guilty to weapons crimes.

Those pleas, mostly for possession of illegal machine guns, will set them up for prison terms. What seemed once to be macho posturing by a group of toughs with guns turns out to have consequences. This is good.

Project 7 members have described themselves as survivalists who wanted to prepare for any kind of apocalypse. Apparently, machine guns, silencers, gunpowder, commercial explosives, pipe bombs, shackles, and ammunition worth tens of thousands of dollars are useful in times of apocalypse.

The stockpile of weaponry was, in part, what led local officials to believe at least one witness's description of the group as diabolical, violent, anarchist warriors who planned to assassinate local leaders, leading to a national revolution.

With a story line like that, members of the national media covered the story of Project 7 with a fervor usually reserved for Hollywood sex-and-death scandals. Montana and the Flathead Valley started to look like Ground Zero for militia mutants.

And then it all went away. Project 7 leader David Burgert, who had surrendered in the woods after threatening to shoot himself, went to prison for possessing an illegal machine gun and possessing it while he was a felon. It was more of a whimper than a blaze of glory for Burgert, who was later diagnosed with paranoia and other disorders.

Project 7 vanished from the front page for a while, but there was a nagging sense of something left undone. Wasn't there a hit list of public officials that Project 7 plotted to kill? What of Burgert's compatriots and all those guns?

As it turns out, the federal government was still working. It apparently counters plotting with plodding, but plodding that eventually gets results.

This spring, Burgert was re-indicted and four other men and one woman were arrested on federal weapons charges. Three of the men still lived in the Flathead. Another, former sheriff candidate, Larry "Chance" Chezem, had moved to Indiana. The woman, Tracy Brockway, was arrested in Georgia.

All pleaded innocent at first and then followed Burgert's lead and changed their pleas to guilty. A guilty plea to federal weapons charges isn't a small matter. For Burgert, for example, it can mean another 10 years in prison, in addition to the seven he's already sentenced to.

There is no doubt that the trials would have made for riveting stories, with testimony and evidence about murder plots, weapons, fugitives from justice, and other details.

Instead, we settle for the guilty pleas and abbreviated testimony ascertaining that guilt. It's a different route to resolution, but it's still satisfying.