Before his trial in St. Paul, Russell Means had entered his name against Dick Wilson's for tribal chairman.  Wilson, still wanting to suppress AIM, said "I won't tolerate 'em, and I won't call the marshals this time, either; we'll handle 'em ourselves."  His men went out marauding, and on election night on February 7, 1974, the sound of gunfire echoed the reservation.  Though he did not campaign in person, Means was barely defeated.  "To tell you the truth, it's better I lost" he says today.  Eventually the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared Wilson's election invalid.  But the Justice Department took no action, and Richard Wilson (restored to office) dismissed the Civil Rights Commission as "a bunch of hoodlums."  Without noticeable protest from U.S. authorities he ordered all those who had voted for Means off the reservation.  His goons embarked on a new reign of terror.  Increasingly, AIM supporters, their families, and their friends were attacked, beaten, and run off the road in an ongoing series of "accidents," many of them fatal.  Despite the open lawlessness and violence he encouraged, Wilson seemed wholly sure of state and federal support, to judge from the fact that nearly one hundred people, mostly AIM members or traditionals were victims of unsolved murders or "accidents" during his terms of office.  By 1975, almost everybody on the reservation went armed, and few dared to walk around outside even in daylight.  (Mattiessen, ibid, p. 128.)

The mass dismissals of Wounded Knee indictments had increased resentment felt by Wilson and his goons.  The violence on Pine Ridge was intensified by the feud between Wilson and Means.  On February 26, 1975, Means, a young AIM leader named Dick Marshall, and others were assaulted in Pine Ridge village by a goon gang led by Richard "Manny" Wilson, Jr., and Duane Brewer of of Dick Wilson's "Highway Safety Committee," which pursued them in a running gunfight down the road toward Wounded Knee.  Marshall and his friends escaped by running a goon roadblock.  The frustrated goons, who later claimed they had been assaulted by machine-gun fire, proceeded to the Pine Ridge airstrip, where they shot up a Cessna airplane that had brought a Wounded Knee defendant and his legal team to the reservation.  When the lawyers returned they realized the plane was too damaged to fly.  Before they could drive away they were surrounded by more than twenty men brandishing shotguns who jumped all over their car and kicked in the windshield.  "You want to be an Indian?  Now you got an Indian car!" the mob yelled.  Three of the lawyers were given severe beatings, and one of them was knifed along the scalp.  They were chased away in their damaged car, having been warned to never return.  Advised of this incident, the FBI gave lie detector tests - not to the goons, but to their victims.  (Mattiessen, ibid, p. 129.)  In the same spirit, a federal grand jury of twenty-one South Dakota citizens was convened not long thereafter to investigate reports of increasing mayhem on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  They indicted - not Dick Wilson and his goons - but Dick Marshall and three AIM people, who were charged with assaulting Manny Wilson and Duane Brewer with a gun.  After days of heated protests from the attorneys, the grand jury also indicted Dick and Manny Wilson, three Brewers, and two others for their action at the airport.