NEWS_ARTICLE.RttP{ahh new hampshire}

Holed-up tax protester, wife convicted

Associated Press | January 18, 2007
PHILIP ELLIOTT

CONCORD, N.H. - A man who has holed up with armed supporters in his cement-walled house for most of his tax evasion trial was found guilty Thursday, along with his wife, of failing to pay federal income taxes for a decade.

Ed Brown has said he will defend himself against capture if necessary.

U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier said Thursday that members of his staff continued talking by telephone with Brown and had no plans to confront him.

Ed Brown's wife, Elaine, a dentist who earned most of the couple's income, has been staying with a son in Massachusetts and attended the trial.

The Browns, of Plainfield, contend the law does not require them to pay federal income tax, while the government says the Browns owe more than $625,000. The Browns stopped paying income taxes in 1996 and stopped filing returns in 1998, a prosecutor said. They could each face decades in prison.

A jury decided they employed a scheme to hide their income and avoid taxes in part by using postal money orders in increments just below the reporting threshold to pay for their hilltop compound. Courts have routinely rejected similar attempts by other taxpayers.

Marshals now have to consider how to seize the Browns' assets. The jury was deliberating whether the Browns should lose their home.

"We've established a good line of communication, all of our conversations have been amicable and friendly, and that's how we expect they will continue," Monier said.

Ed Brown stopped attending court midway through the trial, which began Jan. 9. His wife remains out on bail pending the couple's April 24 sentencing; she has said she loves her husband, but that his way of handling the case is not hers.

A man who answered the telephone at the Browns' house Thursday afternoon said Ed Brown could not come to the phone, but had expected a guilty verdict.

"He's here at the house, and he's not leaving of his own free will," said the man, who identified himself only as Bernie.

Ed Brown, a retired exterminator, has said he stayed home to protest a system that had already convicted him.

"Most Americans would cower and cringe and raise their hands and surrender like a good little slave," he told reporters at his home this week.

"I won't. Under no circumstances. I do not tolerate cowardliness, oppression, bulliness, and I certainly don't tolerate a federal agency that has absolutely zero jurisdiction in my state, never mind in my county, in my town."