Lanny Sinkin. Photo by Lisa Krantz.
By Brian Chasnoff
November 2011
A few years before Lanny Sinkin became the leader of a local nonprofit that advocates for solar power, he flew to Washington and knocked on the door of the White House with a document that would prove an even harder sell than investments in solar panels.
It was a declaration that the Kingdom of Hawaii had seceded from the United States.
“I said, ‘I have a package I want to deliver to the president,’” Sinkin said, smiling through his white beard at the memory. “Well, the Secret Service was on me, taking me inside to an interrogation room, going through the package, asking me all kinds of questions: ‘What is this kingdom stuff?’”
Sinkin never received a response from then-President George W. Bush. But he says that doesn’t matter.
The Kingdom of Hawaii, illegally overthrown by the United States more than a century ago, has been restored, he says, and a king, to whom Sinkin serves as chief advocate and spiritual adviser whenever he’s not running Solar San Antonio, is in place.
The “king,” Edmund Keli’i Silva Jr., a fisherman and kung fu instructor on the island of Oahu, is also a convicted felon who served 13 years in prison for stealing more than half a million dollars.
But such a criminal history has only strengthened Sinkin’s faith that Silva is king. His imprisonment, he says, was a political conspiracy on par with the United States’ theft of the Hawaiian islands.
“The kingdom never went away,” Sinkin said. “The kingdom government got dissolved. Now the kingdom government has been reactivated.”
