A standoff in gun country
After the opening of a tactical weapons site in rural Vermont, a zoning dispute has escalated
PAWLET, Vt. — Fear has gradually spread in the town of Pawlet.
In the hills west of town — which is where the trouble started — the houses are remote, separated by wind-scoured stretches of cropland. Those people are the most jittery.
Some of them have installed cameras with infrared lights so they could pick up figures that might be moving in the dark around their houses. A few have invested in bulletproof vests.
None of it makes them feel entirely safe. Michelle Tilander, 63, a retired physical therapist who moved to West Pawlet 10 years ago, said she had written a letter to be opened in case she or her husband should be hurt or killed.
“The police come in, they’ll find that envelope and they’ll know who to question,” she said.
She is talking about Daniel Banyai, a 47-year-old New Yorker who, attracted by Vermont’s relaxed gun laws, bought 30 acres in this rural town of around 1,400 and transformed it into his dream project, a training camp where visitors could practice shooting as if engaged in armed combat.
Whether those fears are warranted is a question that has preoccupied Vermont law enforcement for months. Certainly, the dispute has escalated over three years from a zoning matter into something more combustible, as Banyai resisted the town’s demands to dismantle his weapons training facility, Slate Ridge. Anonymous threats to his opponents have appeared online.
He has argued that his project is protected under the Second Amendment, and, over social media, has called for fellow gun rights advocates to back him up.
“I’m never leaving this land,” he said in an interview. “And I didn’t ask for this war to start, but I’m going to see it through. I want to see through my victory because I bought this land free and clear.”
These collisions do not typically happen in Vermont, whose lenient approach to guns grew out of a centuries-old culture of hunting and farming. But just as school shootings have shaken those shared assumptions, so too have the belligerent public politics of the Trump era.
The State Police have resisted stepping in, saying they do not believe Banyai has violated any Vermont state law. But a January court order set the stage for confrontation, ruling that Banyai must stop using Slate Ridge for training, and the town is now seeking a permanent injunction that could culminate in foreclosure.
“The question is, kind of, how does this end?” said Jessica Van Oort, 44, a Pawlet shop owner who serves as chair of the town’s planning commission.
Banyai, a stocky man from upstate New York with a bushy, untrimmed beard, presented himself to Pawlet’s development board in 2018 as “a veteran who is passionate about guns.” He was mysterious about his past, alluding to overseas service in the Middle East but refusing to offer any details.
His goal was to open a tactical weapons training site featuring as few limits as possible, allowing firearms banned or frowned upon in other places, he said in an interview this month. He chose Vermont specifically because it allowed “constitutional carry,” or carrying a weapon without a permit, he said.
He was aware that similar projects — like a gun range planned for the town of Warner, New Hampshire — had been blocked by community opposition, and sought to avoid that outcome. His predecessor’s mistake, he said, was trying to obtain licenses from the town before starting operation.
“He went to ‘Let me ask for permission,’ ” Banyai said. “Here, I asked for forgiveness.”
In front of the building he uses for instruction, Banyai flies the flag of the Green Mountain Boys, the militia formed in 1770 to keep out land surveyors from New York, then a British province.
On his land, in facilities he said cost $1.6 million, visitors can reenact a range of field exercises — a suburban house, for home invasions; a large open space surrounded by berms, for carjacking and vehicle assaults; and shipboard structures, for high-seas piracy. Months of protests, he said, have made such exercises relevant to many Americans.
“People are more believing the hypotheticals with all the rioting,” he said. “People are getting more conscientious of, you know, how do I defend myself ?”
He said that most of his visitors came from states with more restrictive gun laws, like New York and Massachusetts, and that he allowed a militia to train at the site, though he would not identify it. Banyai said he had selected the plot in West Pawlet because it was isolated and would not disturb the neighbors.
That turned out to be wrong. Tilander recalls an afternoon in 2018, when she and her husband, Paul, were sitting in their backyard, and began to hear a kind of shooting they had never heard before.
The Tilanders are gun owners themselves; for years, they belonged to a sportsmen’s club, enjoying afternoons of target shooting followed by convivial steak dinners. What they were hearing from Banyai’s land was something entirely different.
“All of a sudden, we hear ARs — several ARs — going off, all at the same time, over and over and over,” she said, referring to variants of the AR-15 line. “Paul just said, ‘What is going on around here? It sounds like Vietnam.’ ”
The neighbors mobilized against Banyai’s new weapons range in the usual way. They complained about the noise. They circulated a petition. They showed up at meetings.
One adjoining neighbor “explained that as an owner of a horse stable they have a lot to lose, that they do not want to live through a war, and that they were there first,” read notes from a town development board meeting in
One reason they were irritated is because Vermont’s land use law, known as Act 250, is notoriously burdensome, requiring permits for anything built for a commercial purpose.
“People do get bent out of shape
when you are flouting the rules everyone else is following,” said Merrill Bent, the town’s attorney since the summer of 2019. “They’re like, wait a minute, I had to get a permit for my chicken coop.”
But over the months that followed, the zoning dispute turned into another, less familiar kind of problem.
It turned out Banyai had no desire to win over the town. Instead, he fought back tenaciously in court, arguing that his weapons site did not require land use permits from the state because he did not charge for admission. At a town meeting, he accused town officials, without evidence, of corruption, homophobia and membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He made it clear he would not back down.
“If there’s two types of people in this world — people that are strong and people that are weak,” he explained in an interview, “I’m among the strong percentage.”
Threats against the complaining neighbors began to appear on Slate Ridge’s Facebook page, unsigned and cryptic, alongside right-wing memes and ominous photographs of stockpiles of weapons.
In 2019, the feed featured a picture of the Tilanders’ house with the caption, “Many of you ask how can I get closer to Slate Ridge. Some people living close are leaving. Here is the house the folks are moving out of. The property will be available real soon.”
Other threats targeted Mandy Hulett, who lives next door to Slate Ridge. Posts called for the “eradication” of the Huletts and listed their home address, and asked followers to find an SUV “to shoot up and then blow up,” and specified
the make and model of the car the Huletts had given their teenage daughter.
Banyai has said he does not write or supervise the postings. Last month, however, a judge granted Hulett a two-year stalking order against Banyai, noting that although Banyai denied controlling Slate Ridge’s social media, “the court did not find that testimony to be credible.”
An investigative news outlet, VT Digger, picked up the story, and the neighbors looked into Banyai’s past. An Army spokesman confirmed that Banyai had served briefly in the 1990s, showing up in records as a private, the Army’s lowest rank.
More recently, he had legal troubles in New York. In 2018, court records showed, he had been banned from the campus of Pace University, where he was pursuing a master’s degree in homeland security, for threatening an assistant dean. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to a class D felony charge of criminal weapons possession, and is awaiting sentencing in that case. He has filed a motion to vacate his guilty plea, said his lawyer in the case, Anthony Cillis.
His New York pistol permit has been suspended pending the outcome of the case, according to the Dutchess County District Attorney’s Office.
But in Vermont, the efforts to shutter his training site seemed at a standstill. Tilander said she believed the main reason was that Vermont’s law enforcement bodies, from the town level up to the state, were fearful of an armed confrontation.
“Nobody wants to go in there because everybody’s afraid of him,” she said. “We’re 99 and ninetenths percent sure from everything he said, he has a big cache of heavy-duty weaponry and explosive material.”
In fact, in a state that has long relied on voluntary compliance, the problem of Slate Ridge seemed to fall between jurisdictions.
The state’s Natural Resources Board — which requires permits for any commercial development — refused to send its inspectors to Slate Ridge because of concerns that Banyai might be dangerous, and in 2018 and 2019 asked law enforcement to take over the case, said Evan Meenan, associate general counsel for the body.
The State Police refused, explaining that land use has never fallen within their responsibilities. Since then, the State Police
have also investigated at least 10 complaints against Banyai without finding information to warrant any criminal charge, said Michael Schirling, the state’s commissioner of public safety. Fear, he said, was not a factor.
In recent weeks, Banyai has made the conflict into a political cause, declaring his candidacy for town selectman under the motto “Make Pawlet Great Again.”
Whatever the outcome of the dispute, it has already left its mark on Pawlet.
Last February, Slate Ridge’s Facebook page invited followers to attend the town’s Select Board meeting with weapons and trauma kits; the meeting was canceled because of the coronavirus, but some of the town employees were deeply shaken.
Later, the feed published a photograph of Pawlet’s Town Hall, a plain wooden-framed structure that has stood since 1881.
“No Alarm, No Security Camera, Single Pane Windows, No Deadbolts, 30-40 Minutes Police Response Time, Dead Zone For All Cell Service, No Safe Room,” the caption read, and went on to list the names of six town employees who work there.
In March, the town clerk requested funding to install security cameras in the building.
Van Oort, who is running for the Select Board, said it dawned on her gradually how heavily the town relies on a spirit of voluntary cooperation.
“The real difficulty is, when someone just decides not to obey a civil law, what happens?” she said.
Indeed, no one knows what will happen, later this spring, if the court injunction is made permanent and Banyai is asked to dismantle his gun ranges and pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines to the town.
Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, a former Progressive state representative who has urged the state to intervene, drew a parallel with the Jan. 6 events at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, when “what everyone thought would be a cranky protest” deteriorated into violence.
Hulett said she now looks at Pawlet, where her family has farmed since the 18th century, as an excessively trusting place — naive, in the way that small towns are. Or that is what it was, anyway.
“I think we all kind of let our guard down,” she said. “We’re just not equipped to deal with people like him.”
NEW YORK — On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was chandeliers, a Tiffany bracelet and a vintage velvet chair with silver-colored rams’ heads. In Jackson Heights in Queens, it was a Korean wedding chest, and in Park Slope in Brooklyn, a giant stiletto chair with a purple zebra pattern.
All of these, remarkably, were free.
They were just a few of the items that have been found discarded on the stoops or streets of New York City over the past year, a byproduct of the pandemic that has amounted to such an abundance of valuable trash that some are calling it “The Golden Age of Free Stuff.”
The bonanza of freebies has prompted New Yorkers to prowl the city every day, combing through trash as if they were panning for gold, even at the risk of carrying bedbugs home.
“Look at this!” exclaimed Sonia Izak, after spotting a chair with a missing leg as she walked around her block on the Upper East Side on a recent frigid evening. She lifted the bottom to look for a label.
“Look, literally, it’s a West Elm! This looks very clean,” she said. “It’s in perfect condition except for the leg. They could probably order this from the company.”
Looking through other people’s trash and dragging away used objects isn’t new. But what has come to be known as “stooping,” or more recently, “trash stalking,” has become so widespread since the start of the pandemic that several Instagram accounts devoted to it have attracted thousands of followers and transformed what used to be a niche activity into a phenomenon.
Early on, many of the items found discarded,
according to regular sidewalk shoppers, appeared to be from New Yorkers leaving the city, at least temporarily, as the outbreak grew worse. But over time, cooped-up New Yorkers are seemingly going through an extended spring cleaning, yielding a windfall of unwanted stuff.
Instagram accounts post dozens of photos of discarded items sent each day by passersby, or “stoopers” (aficionados are called “super stoopers”). The more coveted items, including dressers with marble tops or a grand piano, cause a minor frenzy as people rush to get their hands on them.
The discards also sometimes reflect the
demographics of the neighborhoods where they were found.
The velvet chair with rams’ heads on the Upper East Side was in fairly good condition; similar ones are selling online for over $1,000. A Japanese-style four-panel screen showing red-crested cranes was spotted in front of the United Nations headquarters, prompting speculation that it had belonged to a diplomat.
Then there are more functional pieces like sinks, ovens, tables, beds and sofas, some of them looking new.
But eclectic would be a moreaccuratedescriptionof the collection of unwanted
goods often found abandoned.
A piano made of dark wood tossed out in Alphabet City in Manhattan. A bowling ball with a leather case available in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. A terrifying-looking dollhouse and an equally nightmare-inducing portrait of a family of cats were up for grabs on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One resident even left a pet turtle out on their stoop. It has since found a new home.
“I don’t see the amount of stuff on the street diminishing at all; it just seems to be increasing,” said Jessica Wolff, 36, who works in sustainable fashion and runs @stoopinginqueens
on Instagram. She started the account in the summer of 2019 and had about 250 followers. Now she has over 10,000.
Some of those prowling the streets in search of possible gems appear motivated by frugality.
“If there is something you’d spend $400 on Wayfair on my feed, you’ll save yourself $400,” said Wolff, recalling a family that recently found a butcher block countertop from Home Depot.
Another major drive is boredom. Stooping has given people a creative outlet as well as an opportunity to get out of the house.
“I have a lot of people who used to think that going through trash was disgusting but who now see the value,” Wolff said. “The pandemic made this trendy. It’s cool now.”
Domarc Dayondon, 34, says he was one of those people. He changed his mind after a friend moved to the city last year from South Carolina and found an expensive couch and a wooden coffee table, both of them in good shape.
“In the beginning I was like, ‘Dude, that’s trash,’ ” he said. “But then, I was like, ‘Whoa, am I the only one that’s spending money going to Ikea to buy a cheap coffee table?’ ”
He started following various social media accounts on stooping and quickly got addicted to it, likening it to playing “Pokémon Go,” in which “you’re going on an adventure and seeing if you get rewarded.”
On a recent evening on the Upper East Side, Izak and P.J. Gach braved the cold to go “trash stalking,” a term Gach, a writer, coined after starting another Instagram account, @nycfreeatthecurb, in December.
The two became friends over an ottoman that was being tossed out, and then a little later, over vintage hats that Izak had spotted.
“I flew over there,” Gach said. “Ended up taking the hats, a lampshade and a backgammon set.”
Another time, she found a silver Tiffany bracelet with the signature heart tag.
Izak, a former accountant in a real estate company, recalled being horrified at the sight of doormen chopping furniture up in her neighborhood to make it easier for sanitation trucks to haul away. She found a chair curved like a sleigh, newly upholstered, made of wood and vintage leather. She uploaded the photo onto her account and sat in the chair in the cold until a man arrived and took it away.
“I saved it from the ax!”