Banyai’s supporters encouraged defiance. One posted, “Time to stand against tyranny!” McLain, the YouTube interviewer, who talked about making ghost guns on a 3-D printer and titled one of his episodes “Become Ungovernable,” praised Banyai’s “civil disobedience.” Banyai told him, “I’m seeing the characteristics of where society is going, how I’m going to be able to defend myself.” Banyai had held a Federal Firearms License, which enabled him to buy and sell guns.
The zoning matter became what one local news organization called, in an understatement, a “maelstrom” of legal procedure, further slowed by Banyai’s decision, initially, to represent himself. In court and in broadcast interviews, he behaved with a fidgety intensity, and often attempted to sound lawyerly. (“Objection, irrelevant.”) At one hearing, he lashed out when the judge stopped him from exploring what “decimal” levels qualified a noise as “federally annoying.” In e-mails, he told authority figures to call him “sir.”
On March 5, 2021, the presiding judge, Thomas Durkin, formally ordered Banyai to remove any unlawful structures. Durkin had written that he found it “difficult to imagine an alleged zoning violation that could be the source of more significant irreparable harm than an unpermitted shooting range.”
Banyai appealed. He also hosted a “Second Amendment Picnic” at Slate Ridge. McLain posted a video from the event, including interviews with a firearms customizer and a member of a local militia; he had already posted a video tour of the property, in which Banyai, sitting in the schoolhouse, bragged about having a rocket launcher and “more guns than anyone in this area.”
The Vermont Supreme Court upheld Durkin’s ruling on January 14, 2022. The gunfire at Slate Ridge largely stopped. Banyai grudgingly reported that he was working on demolishing the unpermitted structures. Pawlet officials wanted to see for themselves, but Banyai had “issued a ‘No Trespassing/We Will Shoot’ warning to town personnel,” the zoning administrator wrote, in an e-mail. Banyai would agree to an inspection and then cancel it, or try to. His various case-related excuses in court included “family emergency,” hospitalization, deployment, poverty, sabotage, and mud.
Finally, in May of 2022, three Pawlet officials, including Bent, the town attorney, were allowed past Banyai’s gate, accompanied by the Rutland County sheriff, David Fox, and a couple of deputies. The tactical façade was gone. The schoolhouse now sat on a trailer—Banyai tried to argue that this met the terms of the court’s order. The inspectors also discovered numerous new structures, including a barn, grain silos, an enormous tank marked “JET A-1 FUEL,” and animal pens. Donkeys, pigs, cattle, and goats now roamed about. Banyai was calling his property Slate Ridge Farm. He argued that, under state law, the changes were “agricultural” and therefore immune to Pawlet’s zoning regulations.
Judge Durkin had ultimately imposed a fine of two hundred dollars per day until Banyai complied with the court order. This February, he ruled Banyai in contempt. When the violations continued to go unresolved, the judge, in July, ordered him arrested. Bent’s staff e-mailed Sheriff Fox, “Please let our office know when he has been taken into custody.”
To Bent’s surprise, the sheriff asserted that the arrest was perhaps best handled by the Vermont State Police. Pawleteans wondered if law-enforcement officers were scared of Banyai—or friendly with him. “We are not friends,” Fox told me the other day, when I found him working the metal detector at the Rutland District and Family Courthouse. He said that neither he nor his deputies had ever trained at Slate Ridge, as some suspected. Townspeople’s suspicions were based, in part, on a printed message that reportedly once hung on Banyai’s range. It thanked law-enforcement officers and ranked military members by first name and last initial for inspiration or help in developing Slate Ridge. The list included “Gen. David P.” During one of his interviews with McLain, Banyai once called General David Petraeus, the retired four-star general and former C.I.A. director, a “mentor.” (Through a spokesperson, Petraeus said that he does not recall any interactions with Banyai and that he does not mentor him “in any capacity.”) Dustin Circe, a state game warden, wasn’t on the list, but after visiting the range he e-mailed a supervisor, “IT IS AWESOME.”
A neighbor discreetly mounted a trail camera to a nearby tree and was disappointed to see officers do little more than drive by. The arrest warrant expired in September. Townspeople were confounded by the way Banyai managed to avoid accountability and perpetuate tension in the neighborhood. It was concerning that a single person had the ability to hold “the town and state hostage,” as one neighbor had complained to a Pawlet official. Bent told the court, “The parties can safely assume that the gamesmanship will continue for as long as the court permits it to.”
