Matt Rossell. He could undo the suspicions of strangers.

by PHILIP DAWDY
pdawdy@wweek.com

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Recent related stories:
Shock the Monkeys: published January 3, 2001
The Brain Gain: published January 10, 2001

May 9, 1998. A monkey missing the tip of a finger. Blood splattered everywhere. Matt Rossell, an animal care technician at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Hillsboro, takes a camera from his blue lab coat. Click. He can only guess at the injury's cause. But he's seen enough monkeys to know that something is amiss. Click. Rossell wears his brown hair in a short bowl cut, giving him a look of perpetual innocence. Matt Rossell is no innocent. Click. Just as Rossell again points the lens, a supervisor enters the room. Rossell freezes, but, for some reason, the supervisor suspects nothing.

Aug. 28, 2000. Rossell springs his photos and videotapes on the world, giving the public a glimpse into the sometimes-grisly side of primate research. It's his greatest, and final, feat as a mole.

The son of an office-equipment repairman, Matt Rossell was an accidental spy.

In early 1995 he was stuck in a dead-end job, ferrying developmentally disabled adults on daily errands in Omaha, Neb. He wanted to return to Oregon, where he'd taken a bicycle trip in 1988. To raise money, he took a weekend job as a security guard at Boys Town National Research Hospital, which uses animals to research hearing disabilities.

One weekend, while making his rounds among the facility's laboratories, he heard crying. Curious, he checked the laboratory door of Edward Walsh. Inside, he discovered litters of kittens, their heads shaved and bisected with sutured surgical scars. The felines were subjects of research into congenital deafness; the nerves connecting their ears and brains had been severed.

In the glow of overhead fluorescent lights, Rossell had an epiphany. He'd loved animals since his childhood and been a vegetarian since his days at the University of Nebraska at Kearney three years earlier. But this moment would change his life.

Mother's milk is the only love these kittens received as part of research into congenital deafness at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Neb., where Matt Rossell worked as an undercover animal-abuse investigator from 1995 to 1996.

"I was shocked and saddened," Rossell, 31, says. "My bottom line was that the world know about those kittens."

Within days, Rossell contacted PETA, the $17 million-a-year animal-rights advocacy group best known for its zany publicity stunts. Headquartered in Norfolk, Va., PETA is locked in a veritable Cold War with animal researchers, breeders and circuses. Much of its work involves pamphleteering and marketing, such as its advertising campaign featuring supermodels who'd rather go naked than wear fur coats. But PETA also investigates rumors of animal abuse.

To develop hard evidence, the 142-person organization employs undercover agents. By the standards of modern espionage, PETA's equipment is crude (video cameras and notepads) and its methods time-tested. Operating alone, investigators insinuate themselves into the confidence of fellow employees and exploit unguarded moments to document suspected animal abuse. Then they betray that trust in the name of animal rights.

The job is a pressure cooker: PETA says its investigators average only two years on the job.

When Rossell called PETA about what he'd seen in the laboratory, he took a step that would ultimately lead him into the heart of America's biological-industrial complex.

For four months, Rossell took notes and, using a PETA-supplied Hi-8 video camera, tried to document violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the care of research animals. Then Rossell over-nighted his evidence to PETA, quit his jobs and took a road trip through Oregon and Alaska.

He didn't know if he'd delivered the goods. "I was completely green to this process," he says.

In December 1995, he called Mary Beth Sweetland, PETA's research head, from Portland and learned that the evidence he'd gathered wasn't enough. Sweetland asked Rossell if he would consider moving back to Omaha, regaining his security-guard job full-time and pulling together strong enough evidence to nail Walsh.

This time, Sweetland told him, PETA would pay Rossell the equivalent of $20,000 a year: his roughly $16,000 guard's salary plus $4,000.

Rossell wasn't exactly fond of his home state--"It was Nebraska, I'd been waiting to leave my whole life"--but agreed anyway.

For the next eight months, Rossell operated undercover, mixing his guard's duties with late-night videotaping sessions in Walsh's laboratory. He didn't even tell his parents what he was doing.

"It gnawed at me," he says of his frustration at not being able to explain to his parents why he was dressing up in a security guard's polyester suit and clip-on tie each day when he had a teaching degree.

In August 1996, confident that his evidence was solid, he quit his post at the research center. Rossell had delivered tapes showing wailing kittens unable to stand due to their hearing impairment. The next week, PETA held a press conference at a Holiday Inn and announced that it would file a complaint with federal agencies. At the conference, it released Rossell's videotaped images and asked him to comment.

"I was scared to death," he says. "I'd never done any public speaking, and I had four television cameras and mics sticking in my face."

The complaint, alleging violations of the Animal Welfare Act, resulted in the laboratory being shut down for six months.

 

Fur coats have ugly beginnings. In 1997, at the Aeschleman Fur Co. in Roanoke, Ill., Rossell passed himself off as wanting to start his own fur farm and snapped pictures of a fox that had cannibalized itself, as well as the foxes' cages with urine collection buckets underneath.

"If we never heard about this again, it would be fine with me," says Walt Jesteadt, Boys Town's director of research, who describes the experience as the most traumatic in his institution's history.

Still, Walsh and a colleague were later cleared of all allegations.

Rossell says it was a typical whitewash by the biomedical industry's old-boy network. But he had found his calling--he was hooked on undercover work.

Fearlessness, innocence and deceitfulness rarely co-exist in the same human being, but they are all essential for animal-abuse investigators. Rossell had them on tap.

"I wish I could clone him," says Sweetland, who says that over PETA's 21-year history, Rossell rates as one of its top three investigators.

He had an intuitive ability to build instant trust with strangers and get them to be honest. "People love to talk and talk about themselves, and if you're willing to listen, you learn a lot about where to look," he says. "I always had my camera in an accessible place, and I had a story ready in case I got caught."

In August 1996, PETA's Sweetland dispatched him to Arkansas, a state with a slew of animal dealers. Driving a 1986 Toyota pickup and accompanied by his dog, Paisley, Rossell plied the back highways of the old, weird America, checking into sideshows including one that featured crocodiles and chimpanzees.

At each stop, he was propelled by the temporary faith that he'd find animal abuse to document--but each time, he wheeled back onto the highway disappointed. "Nothing but dead ends" is how Rossell describes the experience.

"You can't just waltz in someplace where there's animal abuse and get a job," he says.

In West Fork, Ark., Rossell drove up to the compound of a woman PETA suspected of illegally selling white tigers. He hopped over a locked gate and told her he was the drummer for a band that had recorded a song called "White Tiger."

The breeder was so taken with Rossell's enthusiasm that she photographed him clutching a tiger cub on her kitchen floor. She did not, however, agree to sell him any of the big cats.

Rossell began to wonder when all the human loneliness, the psychic price of espionage--a dog for company and the occasional phone call to his girlfriend in Portland--would pay off.

In September 1996, Rossell joined the Walker Bros. Circus in Tennessee. This mission involved two circus elephants that allegedly had tuberculosis.

Circuses are staffed by below-minimum-wage workers who are often on the lam from straight society. "People who can't get a job anywhere else in society work for us," says Norma Frazier, a former elephant trainer for Walker Bros., who still works for the company.

Compare and Contrast: The first two frames compare juvenile monkeys; in OHSU's image they're happily grooming one another, while in Rossell's image, they are huddled in a feces-strewn enclosure. The second two frames show a monkey named Rodney. In OHSU's image, he is the model of caged research animal well-being, while in Rossell's he has bitten through the skin on his arms.

Rossell simply walked up to the elephant handlers, told them he was "roaming" and announced that "elephants were cool." He quickly landed a job as a rigger, a person who sets up the big top and handles props during shows. The pay was $150 a week plus two meals a day (subtracted from his $20,000 PETA salary).

Raising and lowering the big top--dangerous grunt work, as Rossell recalls--took six hours each day. He could handle the work--"It's slavery; maybe that's why at 10 am these people are drunk and high on crack"--but the accompanying social behavior was where he drew the line. He didn't, for example, smoke cigarettes or drink Hamm's on the job. Crack cocaine was out of the question.

Once he tried to capture the thwak-thwak of a handler beating an elephant on tape, using a small cassette recorder he'd stashed in his shorts pocket. Seeing the recorder's outline in Rossell's shorts, one of his fellow riggers began to hector the wiry Nebraskan: "I knew you smoked cigarettes, I just knew it."

Rossell grinned. The next morning he bought a pack of Camel Lights and taught himself to smoke.

As October 1996 wound down, the Walker Bros. Circus neared Florida. Sneaking off to pay phones at gas stations each morning, Rossell had remained in contact with PETA, updating it on the location and condition of the elephants.

Then, at a breakfast in late October, bad news hit the circus: Florida's Department of Agriculture had banned the elephants from entering the state.

Leroy Coffman, Florida's state veterinarian, says that without PETA's information, his department would not have known the elephants' location or condition nor, subsequently, banned them from the state--an unprecedented action with any circus animal.

With several days of shows scheduled in northern Florida, this was a crisis for the circus.

"PETA," someone snarled. Rossell's heart sank to his stomach. "When you know it's you who turned them in, there's always the thought that someone else does too," he says. "Are they going to pick up on my nervousness, on who doesn't fit in? You just never know."

He feared that if his true identity were known, "they wouldn't hesitate to slit my throat and dump me in a ditch."

Days later, he drove away from the circus and took a camping trip along the Appalachian Trail.

Late that December, as he drove his pickup across the Midwest to visit his parents, PETA's Sweetland asked Rossell to check into the Aeschleman Fur Co. in Roanoke, Ill., 20 miles east of Peoria.

That winter, the days and nights were sub-zero. Rossell drove up to the facility and told owner Daniel Aeschleman that he wanted a job as he was thinking of starting his own fox fur farm.

Aeschleman, who did not return WW's requests for comment, took the bait. Rossell says Aeschleman was in a bind: His 1,000 foxes were about to come into "prime" pelt and his farm hand had recently suffered a heart attack. He took Rossell under his wing, agreeing to pay him with 10 silver fox pups.

The fur farm's operation was "unusual," as Scott Brunton, former state's attorney for Woodford County, Ill., puts it. Not only did Aeschleman harvest pelts, but he kept the foxes in small cages positioned so they would have to urinate into plastic buckets. Aeschleman then packaged the urine in pump containers and sold it to retailers such as K Mart for hunters to use as cover scent.

Rossell rented a room in Peoria and commuted to the farm each day across stubbled fields crusted with wind-blown snow. Sun-up to sundown, his job consisted of cleaning animal cages and feeding the foxes ground chicken meat. Rossell also assisted the farmer in killing approximately 500 foxes by anal electrocution, a procedure in which a fox is held by its clamped jaws while an electric probe is introduced into its rectum. Then the animal is electrocuted. Feces drizzle out; the stench is overpowering; an unblemished pelt is the result.

Each day, Aeschleman took lunch in his farm house, leaving Rossell to eat in his office, located in the fox barn. That's when Rossell would piece together a PETA-supplied body camera--Hi-8 recorder duct-taped to his armpit, lens attached to his coveralls--and wander through the fox barn.

"That camera sucked, it was jury-rigged junk," Rossell says. Often, he'd return to his motel room to discover that the connecting wires had broken, and he'd have to solder them back together.

Rossell spent three months working at the farm, living with the dual rush of catching the foxes' living conditions on videotape and knowing he might suddenly feel the farmer's hand clamp down on his shoulder.

The images that he captured show foxes that have chewed through their skin down to the bone and black mold on the urine buckets--images that PETA uses to this day in its literature.

To protect Rossell's identity, PETA's Sweetland made an anonymous complaint with the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

In March 1997, investigators from the department raided Aeschleman's farm. Rossell stood in the cold and listened to Aeschleman plead with the officials.

"You aren't going to charge me with animal abuse, are you?" he said. "Those animal-rights people will get a hold of it."

Soon after, Rossell quit his job, but he returned that June to claim the fox pups. "I'd killed 500 foxes and I was going to save these," he says.

All business, Aeschleman yanked 10 foxes from their cages. He would hardly look Rossell in the eye. "I need to talk to you," the farmer said. "There's people saying a video was made at my place. Did you do it?"

"No," Rossell answered.

"He wanted to believe me because he liked me so much," he says now. "He didn't have a son and he was still talking about me inheriting his farm. That was a glorious moment when I drove away from there grinning from ear-to-ear, saying 'How the fuck did I pull that off?' I couldn't believe my own story half the time."

In October 1997, Aeschleman pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty and violation of the state's laws on disposal of dead animals. He was fined $400 and sentenced to probation. The next year K Mart pulled his cover-scent product from its shelves nationwide.

Brunton says Rossell's documentation was critical in helping him prosecute the case, the only one of its kind in his memory.

After the tense fur-farm episode, Rossell was disenchanted with PETA. He was convinced that the organization's outlandish publicity stunts--such as sending mare's urine to media outlets--flew in the face of his personal sacrifices. What's more, they so tainted anything connected with PETA that it was easy for the media to reject his hard-won evidence merely by association, meaning his message would never reach the public at large. "I don't buy the 'Jesus was a vegetarian' campaign," he says.

But his spying days were far from over.

In November 1997, he moved to Northeast Portland to live with his girlfriend. For the next four months, he painted her house and worked as a security guard at downtown's Pac West Center. The following March he answered a newspaper advertisement seeking animal-care technicians at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center.

In 1962, the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center opened on 200 acres along what is now the westside MAX line. It was an attempt by the federal government to narrow America's basic science gap after the Soviet Union beat the United States into outer space. Merged with Oregon Health Sciences University in 1998, it is now a state institution receiving almost $30 million a year in federal and private funding to advance the cause of human health.

The majority of that research involves approximately 1,000 singly-caged rhesus monkeys (another 1,600 live in corrals or group housing), a species capable of solving complex thought problems. The center is highly regarded worldwide for its work in reproductive biology, virology and neurology.

But the last several years have not been peaceful. In both 1998 and 1999, there were repeated protests of the center's use of monkeys and, in October 1999, four primate center researchers received envelopes rigged with razor blades mailed by the Animal Liberation Front.

In that light, it's surprising that Rossell could get a job there. He did sanitize his background, omitting his Boys Town and PETA work from his job application. But the primate center compounded Rossell's deception by not doing a thorough background check, amazing for an institution surrounded by cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire.

"It's not like there's a database of former PETA investigators," says Susan Smith, the primate center's director, in its defense.

Despite repeated requests, James Parker, spokesman for the primate center, declined to make any center employees available to discuss their feelings about Rossell. But it's clear that he was a model employee, receiving "outstanding" performance reviews and being named "Employee of the Quarter" for the fourth quarter of 1999. In April 2000 he was named to the center's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, a scientific panel charged with overseeing the use of primates in research projects. It is almost exclusively staffed by scientists with a long tenure at the primate center.

At the same time, Rossell worked through lunch and rest breaks, making videotapes and snapping photographs of monkeys who had mutilated themselves and were behaving in a near-psychotic manner--the result, Rossell says, of their being housed alone in small, stainless-steel cages.

Rossell says he had all the evidence he needed to go public by the summer of 1999. Instead, he did nothing.

He hoped that he could change the primate center from within.

In a performance review on Nov. 11, 1999, Carol Niemeyer, head of the center's psychological well-being program, to which Rossell had been assigned, notes that he "presents ideas for making the program more effective" and had been providing the caged monkeys with produce donated by a local grocer. "He shows great promise." She had even proposed that a new position be created for Rossell.

But by last spring Rossell had become convinced that little would change at the primate center. For example, the federally mandated "environmental-enrichment program," in which chew toys are given to caged monkeys to remedy their destructive behavior, was not working.

"Foxes are mostly solitary animals," he says, comparing his experience with Aeschleman's fur farm. "Primates are social. And fur foxes only live to be one year old. Monkeys live far longer."

Especially chilling was observing male rhesus monkeys being subjected to a process known as electro-ejaculation, which he eventually captured on videotape (see "Shock the Monkeys," WW, Jan. 3, 2001).

Daily exposure to the monkeys' conditions took its toll on Rossell. "I'd cry all the way home," he says. "Sometimes, I'd have to hide my head in a book because Jim Parker was on the same train."

In late May 2000, Rossell resigned from his job. But before he left, he persuaded 26 of his fellow technicians to sign a letter to primate center officials. The letter alleged that the center was "a crisis-oriented work environment" and charged that there was lax animal care and that there were violations of federal law at the center, among other allegations.

Convinced that officials weren't taking the charges seriously, Rossell held a press conference in downtown Portland on Aug. 28, 2000, along with In Defense of Animals, an animal rights group based in Mill Valley, Calif., which has long been an opponent of animal experimentation. At the conference he provided copies of the letter and released a videotape showing the electro-ejaculation procedure, a monkey banging into the sides of a cage and infant monkeys huddled in the corner of a feces-strewn enclosure.

He also announced that he would file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, alleging violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

One primate center technician emailed WW last month, claiming that Rossell had tricked co-workers into signing the letter, but declined to respond to further queries. Primate center technicians contacted by WW refused to speak to Rossell's charges.

Last month, after a lengthy investigation, the USDA cleared the primate center of all allegations made by Rossell. But it ordered the center to review--and consider eliminating--its electro-ejaculation procedures. It also ordered the center to begin group-housing its caged rhesus monkeys. The USDA also told the center it would monitor its environmental enrichment program.

"The Oregon situation has dramatized that there are severe problems behind the doors of primate centers," says Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of government affairs for the Humane Society of the United States.

All along, primate center officials have insisted that Rossell's videotapes verged on fraudulent, contending that they were shot out of context.

In a recent press release, the primate center insisted that Matt Rossell had merely "cried wolf."

According to Susan Smith, the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center and the other seven federally funded regional primate research centers have instituted background check procedures to ensure that another Matt Rossell never gets into their midst.