Former Smoke Shop Owner, Sara Schroedl, Gets Unfair Prison Sentence
Judge James L. Robart sentenced Eddie and Ed Goodridge to 14 months in federal prison on Monday, March 16th, 2009. He also sentenced Sara Schroedl to 8 months in prison. These sentences were not as lenient as other similar cases in the past and in the Judge Robart’s opinion represented an abuse of power. Sara left the politics of the tribe in 2004 and moved out of state in 2005. Sara Schroedl was a minority owner in the corporation that ran the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop. The Goodridges owned 2/3rd’s of the business. Shawn Yanity, tribal chairperson, is the same man who signed the lease agreement in 2003 that allowed the Goodriges to operate the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop. He also testified to the court that the tribe was damaged both financially and emotionally.
Questions remain unanswered as to why Mr. Yanity and the rest of the tribal council did not just simply raise the cigarette tax on the Blue Stilly owners. Prosecutors in the case also brought up the point that the Blue Stilly reopened just days after the raid in 2007 by the ATF, but they failed to mention that the tribal stamping facility, operated by the Stillaguamish Tribe and supervised by the Stillaguamish Police force, was the first stop for any cigarettes before they could be sold. What this means is that the owners of the Blue Stilly could not have reopened without direct support from tribal chairman Shawn Yanity and the Stillaguamish Tribe. According to Eddie Goodridge Jr., “Shawn stamped the cigarettes himself”, in regards to reopening the shop in 2007. The truth is, the tribe was a full on business partner in the operation of the smoke shop. In 2003 they were receiving around $50,000.00 per month, and by 2008 that amount had grown to around $100,000.00 per month. The cancelled checks below are shown for just one month and show checks being written to the tribe, as well as donated to tribal programs such as ‘banksavers’, and written to tribal businesses that were being supported by smoke shop.
Prosecutors and Tribal Chairman Yanity conveniently fail to mention how the tribe profited from the smokeshop business. Other members of the the Stillaguamish Tribe’s board of directors from 2003 to 2007 were privy to and cooperated with the Goodridges in the sale of cigarettes. When the tribe started getting subpoenas from the department of justice, Yanity and other members of tribal council, fearful of losing their postions and being prosecuted themselves, took advice from the newly acquired tribal lawyers and cooperated with prosecutors to put the blame square on the back of the Goodridges. Schroedl, who had very little political invovlement and no invovlment with the smoke shop on a day to day basis, was unfairly grouped with the Goodridges and received a sentence that does not serve justice.
Tribe Breaks Lease with Blue Stilly
The Blue Stilly Smoke Shop was located in Arlington Washington at Island Crossing and sold major brand cigarettes and discounted cigarettes. The smoke shop operated on reservation property of the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians. The Blue Stilly Smoke Shop paid all cigarette taxes and site lease payments to the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians and had done so since it’s inception in 2003. The Stillaguamish Tribe had always acted as the distributor and partner in the operation of the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop cigarette business by receiving all shipments of cigarettes and stamping them before releasing them to the smoke shop for sale. The State of Washington has always wanted the Stillaguamish Tribe to agree to charge and collect the state’s cigarette tax of about $20 per carton. In May of 2007, the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop was raided in a joint effort by the ATF and the State of Washington after several years of “investigation” of a publicly operated facility. The tribe and chariman Yanity still took a year to sign an agreement called a “compact” with the State of Washington. At the same time of the compact agreement, the tribe was forgiven any back-taxes owed to the State of Washington for cigarettes, according to Eddie Goodridge Jr. However, individuals that invested private money and or operated the smoke shop were not. The Blue Stilly Smoke Shop was started in early 2003 by three tribal members who were also on the tribal council. Sara Schroedl mortgaged her own home to finance a third of the venture that she knew would be benefit her tribe as well. At the time the Stillaguamish Tribe had a problem tenant who was running an exisiting smoke shop at the small triangle shaped piece of property near Island Crossing in Arlington. Cigarette taxes owed to the Stillaguamish Tribe were being avoided as well as other despicable actions taking place. The Stillaguamish Tribal Council voted unamiously to remove the tenant and replace his smoke shop with the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop. The Blue Stilly would be owned and operated by 3 Stillaguamish Tribal Council members, while the tribe as a whole would recieve guaranteed income from the venture in the form of cigarette tax and lease payments. The tax amount of $1.00 per carton of cigarettes was established as the cigarette tax that would be paid to the tribe in advance of any sale. The cigarettes would be delivered directly to the tribe’s stamping facility whose security was ran by the tribal police. A lease payment of $10,000.00 per month would be made in advance to the tribe for the right to operate on the reservation property. A 3 year lease, with the option to renew for 3 years, was signed by the tribal chair person and endorsed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). During this same time period the tribal council had been working very hard to establish a casino for their tribe. The casino financing, somewhere in the range of 20 to 40 million, had recently been secured. Whether it is true or not, it was said that the tribe did not have the money to finance the smoke shop themselves and could not borrow it. The idea of the tribe trying to run thier own smoke shop didn’t make sense anyway, as the tribe had proved in other ventures that they were not the best equipped to run their own businesses. In most cases, bickering of unfairness among tribal members and an inability to enforce employee performance had proved fatal to tribal-ran businesses. One example of this is the failed espresso stand that the tribe had tried to run previously at the same location as the smoke shop. The tribe was much better at doing nothing and just collecting tax and lease money. Using an outside company to run a tribal business was a very common practice among tribes. The new casino for example, would be ran by an outside management company with as much as 40% of the profits being taken by the outside company. In the case of the Blue Stilly Smoke Shop, after the tribe broke the lease with the 3 members that had started the business, they entered into an agreement with another indian tribe to manage and run a new smoke shop at the same location. It would be interesting to know what the exact terms of that deal are, but I’m sure those terms won’t be released.