Point Reyes Light- October 15, 1998
Pot bust tipster running for Sonoma County supervisor
By Stephen Barrett
An anonymous tipster who launched a marijuana raid at a Chileno Valley home four years ago has turned out to be a candidate for the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.
Acting on her information, federal and Marin County narcotics officers in January, 1994, raided Scott Joseph Kremer's Chileno Valley ranch and seized 1,340 pot plants.
Kremer was charged with possessing and cultivating marijuana, as well as laundering money.
The case has yet to go to trial while Kremer's attorneys challenge the search warrant issued by Judge Michael Dufficy. If convicted, Kremer faces a minimum of 20 years in federal prison.
Records filed in San Francisco Federal Court reveal that the anonymous tipster was Kremer's ex-girlfriend, Jane Hamilton, a Petaluma city councilwoman now running for Sonoma County supervisor.
This week Hamilton told The Light she began dating Kremer in 1991 but didn't realize he was growing pot until his October 1993 harvest - nearly a year after she was first elected to the Petaluma City Council.
At the time she notified officers that Kremer was growing pot, she did not reveal that she and Kremer had been dating for two years, court records show.
Kremer this week would not comment on Hamilton's assertion that she didn't know he was growing marijuana while they were dating.
When Hamilton anonymously contacted officers, she said Kremer was growing as many as 500 pot plants in his barn under lights powered by a diesel generator.
She told lawmen the generator ran all night and that one could stand outside and smell the marijuana by getting close enough. People came to Kremer for pot, psychedelic mushrooms, and the drug ecstasy, she added.
Court documents show that Hamilton reported Kremer to the Marin County Major Crimes Task Force a couple days before Christmas, 1993.
Kremer claims the two of them had quarreled that very day after he learned Hamilton had contacted his parents following their breakup.
While she was talking with officers anonymously, Hamilton told them that Kremer had given her a black eye two months earlier. This week she told The Light she and Kremer gotten into a fight over his drug business and that he threw her into a bookshelf.
Kremer in contrast told The Light, "We had a fight over my plans to spend the coming Christmas with my family instead of with her.
"I lost my temper and yelled at her. She responded by physically attacking me as I backed away from her. I pushed her off me with open hands. She landed on her bed and jumped at me again.
"I pushed her off a second time, quite forcefully. She landed on the side of her bed, but her head struck the corner of a bookshelf, giving her a cut under her eye and one black eye on the same side as the cut.
"I offered to take her to the local emergency room, but she refused."
Hamilton on Wednesday told The Light that she had felt betrayed when she learned that her boyfriend was growing more than a thousand pot plants at his Chileno Valley ranch.
"I don't do drugs, and I don't want my kids to be around them," she said. "When I found out what he did, I felt it was a very big conflict with my elected responsibilities. It was a betrayal to me and my children."
Following Hamilton's directions, federal drug agents and sheriff's deputies surveilled Kremer's ranch at 4680 Chileno Valley Rd. on Jan. 4, 1994, and conducted an infra-red heat search. They raided his house and arrested him six days later.
Hamilton said this week that she had desired anonymity to protect herself and her children, adding that she received threatening phone calls for months after Kremer's arrest.
"I did not want my children or myself to be used in this case," she said. "It was a very painful and traumatic experience in my life."
She said her relationship with an alleged pot grower, who prosecutors assert had been selling marijuana since 1982, and the fight in which she received a black eye were not kept secret from her colleagues at City Hall or from the brass of the Petaluma police force.
Hamilton subsequently served on the City Council's Domestic Violence Subcommittee in 1994 - a year before Marin County sheriff's deputies learned she was the anonymous tipster in the Kremer case.
Her experience with Kremer made her more understanding and concerned about domestic violence, she said. "It made it very real to me, and it was something I didn't want to go to police with," she said. "It gave me an understanding of the physical trauma, the emotional trauma, and feeling the need to protect my children."
Hamilton was endorsed by the Peace Officers Association of Petaluma during her second campaign for City Council. However, in her race for county supervisor, the organization has endorsed her opponent, Mike Kerns, a Petaluma police sergeant and an anti-drug DARE instructor.
Her relationship with an alleged marijuana grower has not been an issue in her political career, and Hamilton said this week she has nothing to hide. "I didn't commit a crime," she said. "I reported one."
Both Scott Joseph Kremer and I, Jane Hamilton, objected to alleged facts in the article "Pot Bust Tipster is Sonoma Supe Candidate" when it was published. I was misquoted after a contentious telephone interview about events which were then already five years old. Now the article seems to live forever via the internet.
The article mixes three separate issues:marijuana growing,
an accident during a private argument,
my public work on domestic violencethereby, unfairly associating Kremer with domestic violence. This was not my perspective, then, or now.
My objections to the article include:1. I did not say that Kremer and I had argued about his marijuana growing. My account of the argument and what ensued was very close to Kremer’s account.
2. I did not say that I felt my children and I were betrayed. Rather, I told the reporter that my children had liked Kremer.
3. The threatening phone calls I mentioned were about being a city councilperson with political enemies and a public phone number, not about this incident.
4. I did not connect my service on Petaluma's domestic violence subcommittee with the accident. Long before this incident, I was working to get the Petaluma Police department to improve internal procedures for domestic violence. I was the natural council member to serve on that committee when it was created.
5. I objected to being characterized as a victim in this incident. This was not my take on it, nor my conversation with the reporter about it.In contrast to what the article portrays, Scott Joseph Kremer now lists me as a personal character reference.
I appreciate the new publisher of the Point Reyes Light giving me the opportunity to correct the record.
Jane Hamilton
Petaluma
August 7, 2006