The music group Insane Clown Posse has found that their fans have been listed as gang members by the FBI. The fans of the group are known as JUGGALOS and they're having too much fun, damn them.
The successful Band plays music that's a potent brew of heavy metal rap with rhyming hard rock played while the singing duo wears their trademark clown faces. My knowledge is limited as your favorite Clearwater Criminal Defense Lawyer's musical tastes tends toward Miles Davis jazz, so if any FBI investigators are reading this law blog please keep that in mind before placing me on your gang member list.
Of course the FBI has a long history of harassing cultural icons in this country, not only making life difficult for some of the great jazz musicians, but with hundreds of pages of FBI investigations and secret eavesdropping of John Lennon, the leader of a Liverpool band that played a hedonistic subversively scuffled - yea yea yea - music, from what I understand. For fourteen years the FBI refused to release the investigative reports because it would infringe on national security. Oh those were the glory years for law enforcement and especially for the FBI. Yet until now now at least being a fan was safe with little risk other than tinnitus or not hearing what you wouldn't want to know anyway. It must be a real time saver for the FBI to simply list all of the fans of branded bands as a 'gang members' placing entire subcultures under strict scrutiny just because of the music they happen to enjoy or in irony might pretend to enjoy. In Florida the FBI list must be a helpful to local law enforcement, like the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, the St. Petersburg Police Department and the Largo Police Department as they can groom ever more youth to become future defendants by labeling them as gang affiliates and gang members angering parents. Now more Detectives will search an ever expanding network of lists of culturally suspect poets, writers and Liverpool bands by looking for the tale-tell signs of gang subversion in bumper stickers, facebook pages and downloaded itunes songs from the foolish fans, who thought their cultural tastes were part of what it means to be free in America.
The Insane Clown Posse are suing the FBI for turning their fans into criminal suspects. There's at least one Clearwater Criminal Defense Attorney who hopes this goes to a federal jury trial so that it will be FBI under close scrutiny for a change.
