<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Another incident that you dealt with, I mean, earlier you talked about how you and other activists actually did a sit in at the HUD offices, and so you were on that side. Now, during the WTO, you were in a case where now activists were, you were on the other side of the activists. Talk about that and what happened.

BS: When WTO came to Seattle I went to the Tuesday, I went downtown on Tuesday where all the march was, the big march and all the disruption happened at the end of the march, the union people and advocates. They were all pretty calm, but those radicals at the end from the, from the Oregon movement of anarchists... and that turmoil happened all week. The WTO conference ended on Thursday, so Friday, Friday afternoon I get a call from a guy named, "Mr. Santos, my name is Jeff." "Jeff?" I said. "Yeah, just Jeff, and I'm with the, the anarchists here and we're, we've occupied this building in, next to the west precinct in downtown Seattle. This is where we, where our headquarters are for the WTO radicals." It's called their squat. They took over a vacant building from Yuen Lui Studios, and Wah Lui owned the building and he gave them the key originally. He said, okay, you can use the building, but keep it nice and... well, what happened was they trashed the building. So Friday, after the WTO was over, the radicals wanted to stay in the building until there was a negotiation with the owner to have the building turned over to the homeless community. They would not leave until there were, until they were promised that the homeless community would take over the building after they left. So that, so Friday I get a call from Jeff, and he says, "Bob, could you help negotiate this deal?" And I'm thinking, it's 4:30, five o'clock all the offices -- I said, okay, I'll see what I can do. So for a half hour I call the mayor's office, I call everybody else, and I'm put on voicemail. So at five o'clock, well, that's it. So I said, I did all I could do, so I go home. Saturday morning I get a call from the mayor's office. "Bob, there's an issue that's gonna happen here in a couple hours. Still have these young radicals over there at the building, at Lui's building, and the cops, the tac squad is forming around the corner in the parking lot 'cause they're gonna invade the building at noon." So the mayor's office says, "Could you come down and talk to Mr. Lui and the radicals, kind of negotiate something?" I said sure. I'm thinking, oh yeah, sure. So I go and I meet Sharon Lee. She's with the Low Income Housing Institute. She said, "Bob, let's go. I'll go with you and we'll talk to Wah Lui," the owner. We go in and he is pissed. He says, I don't, he says, "I don't want to talk to you about those radicals. I, in good faith I worked with them, had them come in the building. They trashed the building and I want them more than in jail. I want them dead." Well, so we talked. We talk and we talk and we talk, and he's so pissed. He's steaming. And his son is there and, his son is there and he's mad. And he says, you know, these guys have no responsibility. We got a letter from this one group, and that was the SHARE/WHEEL group that works for homeless people, so Wah says, "We got this letter from this homeless group who would like to sit down with us and talk about the future of the building. Now, these are the type of people I could deal with." So I says, oh, okay. That's cool.

So with that, Sharon and I go out, and Sharon says, "You got to go up there." The radicals had locked themselves, barricaded themselves into this building. It's a four story building, and they barricaded themselves and they had booby traps and all that kind of stuff. So they sent me into the building to talk to the leadership, who were on the roof looking down on the cops to see when the cops were coming in. So I go up the stairs, three flights of stairs, and the ladder from the third floor to the roof. And as I'm going up the ladder I'm thinking, "What the hell am I doing doin' this? I'm gonna be a hostage." And I'm thinking all this stuff in my mind, and so I go to the top, and all these young people had their bandanas across their eyes, their noses and their faces, but their eyes were all bloodshot. They were tired. And individually, collectively they wanted to stay there. Individually, I know they would, they would want some kind of excuse to get out of there, 'cause they didn't want to get beat up by the cops that were gonna come in. So they all circled around me, and Jeff, the guy that called me, were all there, and there's a photographer from Life Magazine was among that group. Anyway, he says, "Okay, gang, this is Bob Santos. He's with the federal government." And I hear this groan. "But," he says, "he does a mean Frank Sinatra at the Bush Garden karaoke bar." These radicals were hangin' out -- well, they didn't say they were radicals. They were with the WTO people, but they had gone to the Bush a couple of times, just sort of have a beer or so, and I was singing, so they heard me then. And so when they said that, things sort of calmed down, and I said, "Listen, I know you guys want to wait it out 'til this building is converted over to the homeless. One thing I promise you I will do, I'll talk to the owners because there is a group out there that he might be willing to talk with in negotiating the future of this building as a housing for homeless people. But I'll only talk to them if you walk out with me." I looked around, and everybody's eyes sort of, you could tell they're saying, there's an excuse to get out of this mess. So they did. I go down the ladder and they all followed me out, and as we went out the door there's this big cheer from all these other people, their supporters from outside. They'd gained a victory. Well actually, what happened was that when I went back to Wei Lui, he said he'll talk to the SHARE/WHEEL advocates, but he said he doesn't think they could meet his price, so it never did, it was never converted to homeless. But I got the people out, so that was, my goal was to make sure no one got hurt.

TI: That's a good story. Yeah, that's a good story.

BS: You know, and I looked up at the police officers, they were tired after a week of running around. They didn't want to go in either, but if they did people would've, that would've been a mess.

TI: It could've gotten really ugly.

BS: Really been ugly, yeah.

TI: That was good.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.