Justice through the FBI had an extensive criminal investigation underway. After the acquittals in 1980, the FBI re-opened its investigation in preparation for a federal prosecution. Based on additional evidence, a federal grand jury indicted nine men on civil rights charges in 1983. The case brought by the US attorney "charged the Klansmen and Nazis with racially motivated violence and with interference in a racially integrated event.". Three men were charged with violating the civil rights of the five victims: the defendants were David Wayne Matthews, Jerry Paul Smith and Jack Wilson Fowler, who had been prosecuted and acquitted in the state criminal trial. Six other men were charged with "conspiracy to violate the demonstrators' civil rights::" Virgil Lee Griffin, Sr.; Eddie Dawson (also a police informant), Roland Wayne Wood, Roy Clinton Toney, Coleman Blair Pridmore, and Rayford Milano Caudle On April 15, 1984, all nine defendants were acquitted. The government had a burden to prove the defendants where motivated by racial hatred in order to bring them to federal charges. The CWP believed that the indictment was drawn too narrowly, giving the defense an opportunity to argue that political opposition to Communism and patriotic fervor, rather than racial motivations, prompted the confrontation. Neither trial "investigated the actions of Federal agents or the Greensboro police." Waller v. Butkovich In 1980, survivors filed a civil suit in Federal District Court seeking $48 million in damages. The Christic Institute led the legal effort. The complaint alleged that law-enforcement officials knew "that Klansmen and Nazis would use violence to disrupt the demonstration by Communist labor organizers and black residents of Greensboro but deliberately failed to protect them." Four federal agents were named as defendants in the suit, in addition to 36 Greensboro police and municipal officials, and 20 Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party. Among the federal defendants was Bernard Butkovich of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had worked as an undercover agent in 1979 and infiltrated one of the American Nazi Party chapters about three months before the protest. He testified that a Klansman had referred in a planning meeting to using pipe bombs for possible assaults at the rally, and that he took no further action. The Christic legal team was led by attorneys Lewis Pitts and Daniel Sheehan, together with People's Law Office attorney G. Flint Taylor and attorney Carolyn McAllaster of Durham, North Carolina.