Eric McDavid was convicted in 2007 of a single count of conspiring to damage federal property — a "plot" with no target finally agreed, no explosives that worked, and no action taken — and sentenced to nearly twenty years, the longest Green Scare sentence imposed. The group's engine was "Anna," an 18-to-20-year-old paid FBI informant who had recruited the participants, driven them, housed them in a cabin the Bureau wired for sound, bought the supplies with FBI money, and pushed the reluctant McDavid — who was romantically fixated on her, a fixation her handlers documented and exploited — to keep going.
McDavid's jury was never shown the full record. In 2014, FOIA litigation surfaced roughly 2,500 pages the government had withheld, including correspondence between McDavid and Anna that went to the heart of his entrapment defense. Rather than retry the case, prosecutors agreed to his release in January 2015 after nearly nine years in prison, on a plea to a lesser charge. The case became the movement's canonical entrapment story — proof that the era's "eco-terrorism" plots could be government products from recruitment to arrest.