The founder of Vietnam Veterans of America has had his Ritz-Carlton dwelling tossed by cops looking for evidence of pot distribution after he allegedly sought to mail a package of marijuana at FedEx, according to recently filed police documents.
In papers filed this month in D.C. Superior Court, police say their search of the 23rd Street NW penthouse of wheelchair-bound anti-waractivist Bobby Muller turned up plastic bags and a mason jar filled with “green weed,” scales, packaging material and “bank documents.”
Muller, whose veterans group went on to co-found the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines, has apparently not been arrested. He did not respond to phone calls or email messages requesting comment. Metropolitan Police Department officials also did not return calls.
The warrant’s description of how cops came to focus on an activist who has shared a stage with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and blogged for the Huffington Post would seem a lesson in drug handling 101. First pointer? If you’re going to ship 1.03 pounds of cheeba through the mail, don’t use your real name and address.
According to the warrant, which was obtained by a member of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Intelligence Branch, that’s exactly what Muller did, though the officer wrote that he scrawled “R. Muller,” rather then his full name, on the alleged contraband.
On September 2, workers at the FedEx store located at 2020 K Street smelled what “they believed to be the odor of marijuana” coming from the package, which was headed to an address in Brattleboro, Vermont, says the document. The warrant says that the sniffing workers turned it over to police, who seized the mail and found the smoke.
Someone could theoretically have stolen the vet’s info, of course. But the warrant says there’s evidence the package was his: Muller allegedly used a credit card to pay for shipping. “Mr. Muller also returned to the Fed Ex location on Tuesday Sept. 6, 2011, to find out why his package wasn’t delivered on Saturday, and to file a claim with Fed Ex,” say the papers. “Both this incident and the delivery of the package were documented on the Fed Ex surveillance cameras.”
Interestingly, Muller hasn’t shown up in court records yet, indicating he hasn’t been arrested. MPD didn’t respond to inquiries about the case this morning.
Around the web, and even in a book, Muller is referred to as a Nobel Peace Prize winner—a distinction that might make him the only Nobel laureate to have his home searched for refer. As it happens, the description isn’t quite accurate. “Bobby Muller was the co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which in turn was one of six organizations that founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992,” says Kate Wiggans of ICBL. But according to Allegra Grevelius of the Nobel Foundation, the ICBL’s 1997 Nobel was awarded only to the organization and its leader at the time, Jody Williams. Muller is “not a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate,” says Grevelius.
Photo by Eric Caballero via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0