Federal government wants to seize Grim Reapers Motorcycle Club headquarters in Evansville
Jon Webb Evansville Courier & Press Evansville Indiana September 20, 2023
https://www.courierpress.com/story/news/local/2023/09/20/feds-seeking-to-seize-grim-reapers-headquarters-in-evansville/70863051007/
EVANSVILLE – After indicting and sentencing more than a dozen members of an Evansville motorcycle club accused of being affiliated with a large-scale methamphetamine ring, the federal government is now trying to seize the group’s clubhouse.
Zach Myers, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, filed a civil complaint in December asking a judge to forfeit the building at 1104 E. Diamond Ave. “to the United States of America.”
The civil case, which has featured an amended complaint and the dropping of a defendant, is still winding through court. The latest filing came on Sept. 5.
The amended complaint, issued in late June, says the building is “subject to forfeiture … because it was used, or intended to be used, to commit, or to facilitate, the commission of drug-trafficking offenses.”
It’s the culmination of years of investigation. The feds kicked off the criminal portion of the case in November 2019, when members of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, among others obtained a search warrant and knocked down the club’s door.
They reportedly seized 10 pounds of meth, 23 guns, $35,000 in cash and even a few motorcycles. The drugs themselves reportedly had an estimated street value of more than $250,000.
That all led to a bevy of indictments over the ensuing months and years. The latest sentence was handed down in February.
What the civil complaint says
Aside from the club itself, the main defendant in the civil side of the case is former GRMC leader Gary Wayne Forston.
He was sentenced in October to 16-and-a-half years in prison after he pleaded guilty to four of the 12 counts leveled against him, including distributing methamphetamine and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
e’s currently serving his sentence in Texarkana, Texas, court records state.
As part of his plea deal – which he signed in July 2022 – “Forston agreed that the defendant property was subject to forfeiture and consented to the forfeiture of his interest in the defendant property,” the amended complaint says. Prosecutors claim Forston lived at the club while the meth ring was ongoing.
Prosecutors want the court to block GRMC members from using the building and ultimately hand it over to the U.S. government.
The Grim Reapers’ history in the Evansville area
According to Vanderburgh County Assessor records, the motorcycle club bought the building in 2017 after its former decades-long tenant, The Exotic She Lounge strip club, closed up shop. Members transformed it into the group’s home, painting the top of the façade red and black and brandishing it with the initials of the club: GRMC.
It was just the latest home for the Grim Reapers, who had spent decades bouncing from one Tri-State spot to another.
GRMC is a national group that formed in the mid-1960s. Its website lists chapters in Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee and promotes recent charitable rides.
The Tri-State chapter materialized in the ’70s in Warrick County, inviting “white men” with Harley Davidsons to join. And it almost immediately caused consternation among locals.
In 1977, Newburgh residents erupted when the group rented the former This & That shop downtown for meetings. After they were there a few weeks, town officials tried to give them the boot, claiming the building had been condemned after a fire.
The chapter countered that if the building was condemned, and it had still been rented to them, the town was actually putting them in danger.
“Club members dressed in leather vests and wearing long hair and beards make the residents apprehensive, and they wonder what goes on at the parties thrown by the club” an Evansville Press reporter wrote. “The Reapers say the suspicions, anger, mistrust and fears are unfounded.”
“‘We like to ride and we like to party,’” one member told the Press then. “We’re not different than anybody else.”
By 1981, the Warrick County Sheriff’s Office raided a subsequent club location and arrested more than a dozen members on alcohol and marijuana charges. The cases were eventually dismissed.
And seven months before the 2019 raid in Evansville, a man rammed his truck into the building, jumped out clutching a gun, and fired at people waiting inside. Club members reportedly beat him back with pool cues until police arrived. The man was eventually found guilty but mentally ill on three charges and sentenced to more than nine years in prison
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