If it seems as if the FBI was turning a bazooka on a gnat, the suspicion of Juggalos wasn’t without precedent, as the memo noted. Authorities in four states — Arizona, Utah, California and Pennsylvania — had previously declared Juggalos or particular cliques of Juggalos a gang. Michelle Vasey, who was a gang expert with a small police department outside Phoenix in the mid-2000s, described the problem to me. She began noticing a curious trend on the Yavapai reservation that spread elsewhere: “Several of our gang members were tattooing over their original tattoos with the Hatchet Man,” Vasey says. (A silhouette of a man carrying a hatchet is ICP’s logo.) “They would say, ‘I’m not a member of this gang anymore, I’m a Juggalo,’ but they were still selling drugs. They were still doing drive-bys, and they were still hanging with the same people.”

But Vasey says the gang activity was isolated to a few pockets in the state. She says the vast majority of Juggalos were not gang members and shunned such thuggishness. They were just music fans, no different from Justin Bieber’s Beliebers or Deadheads. According to interviews with police and a review of cases, the situation was similar in other states.

[Randy Newman cared enough about his new album to help pay for it]

Still, the FBI investigation would elevate the matter. During a probe starting in 2011, an analyst queried local authorities about problems they had with Juggalos. In 2013 the FBI released the responses to the nonprofit news site MuckRock following a freedom of information request. While the responses were almost completely redacted, law enforcement officials did attach dozens of local media reports about lurid crimes allegedly committed by Juggalos.

They included a 2006 incident in which a man named Jacob Robida attacked three people at a Massachusetts gay bar with a hatchet and gun. Robida fled and killed a police officer and a hostage after officers tracked him down in Arkansas, before taking his own life. In another instance, two men in Salt Lake City critically injured a teen with a battle ax. (Such reports continue to appear today: Just a few weeks before this latest Gathering of the Juggalos, a man stormed a Massachusetts radio station demanding that the DJ play ICP’s song “My Axe.” To make his point, he happened to be brandishing an ax. No one was hurt.)

The crimes noted by the FBI were real, but the articles often seemed sensational and sloppy, mentioning a perpetrator’s interest in ICP even if the crime was not related to their identity as a Juggalo. Some news outlets found an irresistible narrative in all of this: Clown-makeup-wearing fans were being driven to murder and form gangs by the ultraviolent lyrics of ICP. “ ‘Juggalo killers’ a new breed of gang,” a headline on one of the articles blared. The information would form part of the basis of the FBI’s inclusion of Juggalos in its 2011 biennial gang assessment — which law enforcement officials across the country use as a guide to gangs. “The Juggalos, a loosely-organized hybrid gang, are rapidly expanding into many U.S. communities,” the report noted ominously. “Most crimes committed by the Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic.” In one fell swoop, the FBI had placed all ICP fans under a cloud of suspicion, even though the report later noted that only four states had recognized Juggalos as a problem.

“If you look at the way the feds and states define a gang, they are so vague and general any group could fall under that definition,” Alex Alonso, a professor at Cal State University Long Beach and an expert on street gangs, told me. “I would say it requires a whole lot more for me to put Juggalos in that street gang category. That category carries a lot of consequences.” Alonso says the news clips the FBI collected from local law enforcement largely showed a collection of crimes by individuals, not a criminal enterprise that was organized, had a hierarchy or was working to further its own criminal interests, as one would expect from even a loosely coordinated gang.

When I reached out to the FBI to ask about the Juggalos situation, no one would comment on the problems or criticisms of the gang label. Instead, the agency issued me a statement: “The 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment was comprised of information shared with the National Gang Intelligence Center and the FBI from law enforcement around the country,” it read. “The 2011 report specifically noted that the Juggalos had been recognized as a gang in only four states.”

The FBI has not included Juggalos in subsequent gang assessments, but the 2011 report is still cited by authorities — including in a recent case in Virginia. Jessica Bonometti had never received a negative review as a Virginia probation officer before her boss summoned her to a meeting in a conference room last year and announced that she was being fired. Bonometti told me she was stunned as the woman gave her a termination packet, which contained the case against her: nine of her Facebook posts showing her love for ICP.