When Governor Ronald Reagan addressed a Nuevas Vistas education conference at the Biltmore Hotel in April 1969, fires broke out in the hotel during his speech. Six young Chicanos — Brown Berets among them, including Carlos Montes — were indicted for conspiracy and arson on the testimony of Fernando Sumaya, an undercover LAPD officer who had infiltrated the Berets and, the defense argued, had himself instigated and possibly set the fires.
The Biltmore Six trials became the movement's exhibit on provocateur policing: juries refused to convict on Sumaya's word, defendants were acquitted or saw charges collapse, and Montes, who fled underground in 1970, was acquitted at his 1979 retrial. Four decades later, in 2011, an FBI-LAPD raid on the aging Montes's home revived the movement's oldest lesson — the surveillance never stopped.