afraid of "Joe Bailie and his militia." The paper had mentioned nothing about defendant Keenan.
What made him decide to tell the government that he had lied at all? It seems to have been the influence of Dell Bidart, another member of the Gardnerville contingent who had testified to the grand jury. Hallert had ridden back home from Reno with his friend Bidart, who had come in another car.
Bidart, who would eventually be the government's strongest witness, is a tall, good-looking, intelligent and clear-minded ex-Marine. He had been distrustful of Joe Bailie from the first time he met him, testimony showed, and had been, apparently, the only one of the garden center coffee-drinkers to ever recognize the possibility that Bailie might do more than talk a lot and distribute political tracts. He later testified that when he met the others after the grand jury testimony, he had been "spooked" to hear they had testified they hadn't known "anything."
So it was after riding back to Gardnerville with Bidart, talking with him, and "having morality feelings" that, said Hallert, he called ATF agent Jim Doreen and told him he had lied.
But when he was questioned by defense counsel, it became apparent that Hallert has virtually no independent recollection of anything that happened. While he often said, during examination, that he is "awfully bad on dates," he usually also couldn't recall who had talked to whom, or what was said, in most of the key incidents upon which the government's case was based.
Asked a question by Walker, Hallert would page and page through the transcripts of his second period of testimony before the grand jury, and then would answer. Asked if he got the answer from the transcript, he would say 'yes.' Asked if he remembered the answer without looking at the transcript, he would say 'no.'
At other times, his answer to a question would begin, as he pointed to a line in the printed transcript, "it says here..."
And he acknowleged that he had studied the transcript the night before and then again that morning.
"Coming down here, I went over it," he said.
Asked at one point "when was the next time you saw Joe Bailie at the garden center," he gives one answer. But reminded of another time he had seen Bailie there, he says that was the next time. Then, asked which it was, he is at a loss. He complains to defense counsel he doesn't "understand where you are going."
The implication seemed clear -- that if he did understand what defense counsel wanted him to say, Rickie Hallert, a young man very anxious to obey, would earnestly try to say it.