Lansing City Pulse
June 22, 2006
There was no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow only fire, destruction, death and the end of a dream. In 1997, when Tom Crosslin decided to call his 34 acres near Vandalia, Michigan Rainbow Farm it had nothing to do with gays, John Sinclair or the pro-pot movement. He called it as he saw it and what he saw was a place where there were a lot of rainbows.
He also saw a place where he and his lover, Rollie Rohm, could live as they wanted, where they could smoke pot and promote its legalization through festivals and where they would be left alone.
That was one of his first mistakes. Local prosecutor Scott Teter saw Rainbow Farm as an in-your-face flaunting of the state’s drug laws and Rollie’s and Tom’s lifestyle as contrarian to his Conservative upbringing. He would become Crosslin’s nemesis and undoing over a several year period.
Ultimately, their legal dueling and shenanigans would come to a nasty conclusion just after Labor Day weekend in 2001 when Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm would fall to police snipers after a five-day standoff.
Dean Kuipers, author of Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke, has captured this disturbing, but captivating story in his new book about the history of Rainbow Farm and the unusual cast of characters that led to both it success as one of the nation’s top pro-drug festival sites and its ultimate descent into tragedy.
Kuipers, an editor for Los Angeles City Beat, a 100,000 circulation alternative weekly, is a graduate of Kalamazoo College and grew up in a nearby suburb of Kalamazoo about 30 miles from Rainbow Farm.
The author is an accomplished journalist who has worked for SPIN Magazine and has also written for Rolling Stone and Playboy.
He stumbled across the Rainbow Farm tragedy a full week after it occurred while reading his hometown newspaper. By November of 2001 he had already traveled to Michigan to write an article for SPIN and began a series of interviews with locals that would number in the hundreds and total thousands of hours.
He said SPIN ultimately decided to pass due to 9-11. He shopped it around to other publications including the New Yorker, but Kuipers said the topic was “too hot” in the post 9-11 era. Playboy Magazine ultimately ran the article in October 2003.
Kuipers then began the task of turning the article into a book, making five, week-long trips to Michigan for interviews. “I would go to Michigan with my visits all mapped out. I would knock on doors. The interviews required me to be there in person. This is rural Michigan. People have no answering machines, don’t answer letters and don’t trust you.”
Kuipers was fortunate to have made friends with Doug Leinbach, an ex-banker who was the farm’s business manager and a close friend to Tom and Rollie. He introduced Kuipers to people close to Tom and Rollie and opened doors that would otherwise be closed.
Kuipers spent 10 months on a first draft working everyday from 4 a.m. -7 a.m.
“This is a great story,” he said. “For a journalist who grew up reading Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, it was the book I always knew I wanted to write.”
The result is a well researched look at the drug wars, the pro-drug movement, rural stoners, an unlikely alliance with the Michigan Militia and how it call came together in one fateful week.
It is also the detailed story of the personalities and politics that brought everyone to that cataclysmic ending.
The book follows Tom Crosslin, an unlikely, modern day Robin Hood and martyr for the pro-pot movement, from his childhood to Rainbow Farm.
He tells the riveting story of Tom, a high school dropout with a nasty temper which would land him in jail time a couple times. For a while Crosslin was a biker who formed his own gang, a long haul truck driver and a business owner with a keen sense for making a buck. He was a no-nonsense guy, loyal to the extreme, but quick with his fists.
He was a landlord and at one time owned more than 50 rental properties and a service company that included steeple jacking where he would erect flagpoles for American Flags. The author also tells the story of Crosslin exploring and finding his own sexuality and how he and Rollie came to be partners and “fathers” to Rollie’s 11 year old son Robert.
Tom was driven by a sense of being left alone which conflicted with his public persona of a gregarious, kind guy who would do anything for somebody needing help. At Christmas he would act as a Santa, and he would buy hot lunches for kids in school who couldn’t afford them.
Under this persona was a seething sense that it wasn’t the government’s business to tell him or anyone if they could smoke marijuana. Starting in 1996, he turned Rainbow Farm into one of the premier pro-hemp festival locations in the country and it attracted all the major players in the pro-pot movement with stars like Merle Haggard and Tommy Chong making their way to Vandalia for Hemp Aid and Roach Roast. It also attracted the long arm of the law. Kuipers also tells about the unlikely alliance of Rainbow Farm and the Michigan Militia which would help galvanize the legal community against them.
Prosecutor Teter would spend years putting together a case to get to Tom and Rollie, but Tom was clever and never put himself in the position of selling drugs. Ultimately, Teter would use the guise of tax fraud to give the law the right to search his property. While there, the police would find guns and a hydroponic growing facility for marijuana.
With both Rollie and Tom facing jail time, coupled with Teter’s intent to use the state’s forfeiture law to take Rainbow Farm, would lead Tom and Rollie deeper in debt and into a state of paranoia and depression.
It would also lead them to a fateful day when they decided they could go no further. Facing loss of the farm and jail, but most importantly loss of Rollie’s son who was taken away to a foster home they decided to leave nothing behind and fight the law. Armed with assault weapons they began burning the farm down. This would result in a standoff involving hundreds of local and state police officers and the FBI.
It was easy to miss the coverage of this fateful day and its later analysis. The standoff and the sniper killing of Tom and Rollie got swept up in the post 9-11 hysteria and would never achieve the notoriety of Ruby Ridge.
The story of the last rainbow at Rainbow Farm is a compelling tale of the war on drugs, two star-crossed lovers and two soldiers in that war who decided that their government had gone too far. Who was right and who was wrong? The debate goes on. It was clear that what Tom and Rollie had going was not legal, but what Kuipers helps make clear is that locals think that they should not have died.
Kuipers said that a civil suit brought by the parents of Rollie is still in the courts.
The author said he is fascinated by men like Tom Crosslin.
“I like to write about men who are locked in arguments that they made with themselves and can’t let go. Tom and Rollie could’ve walked away at anytime but they didn’t,” he said.
Kuipers is starting an author trip to promote his book and it will take him to a pro-hemp festival and an Indiana city near Rainbow Farm. He will be at Schulers Books and Music in the Eastwood Towne Center, 7:30 p.m., Friday June 23.