"When you're protesting in New York City, you're definitely in the big leagues," Ruckus Society director John Sellers said last month while discussing his convention preparations.

Sellers' past comments are one reason New York City officials are on edge about plans by radicals to disrupt the proceedings.

After riots organized by the Ruckus Society shut down the city of Seattle during a meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999, Sellers told Mother Jones magazine:

"I make a distinction between violence and destruction of property. Violence to me is against living things. But inanimate objects? It may be violence under the law but I just don't think it's violence."

Although Ruckus protested both Republican and Democratic conventions in 2000, this year the group will be focusing exclusively on the GOP.

"Everybody is concerned first and foremost with getting the Bush administration out of office," Sellers told the Boston Globe last December.

Why the shift away from bipartisan protest?

Some say Ruckus' decision to spare the Kerry-Edwards campaign may have something to do with a cash grant from the Tides Foundation, an environmental advocacy group heavily funded by charities controlled by would-be first lady Teresa Heinz Kerry.

The Heinz foundation gave more than $4 million to Tides over a seven-year period, according to a study by the Washington-based monitoring group Capital Research Center.

Tides, in turn, funneled at least $39,000 to Ruckus starting in 1999 - and continued to bankroll the protest group's operations even after the Seattle riots.

To be sure, Ruckus is just one of many radical organizations hoping to turn the GOP's convention into a disaster.

But while most protesters plan to adhere to the principle of "nonviolent disruption," at least one organizer is urging the adoption of a particularly dangerous tactic - advising anonymously over the Internet on how to distract the NYPD's bomb-sniffing police dogs.

On Saturday, New York Congressman Peter King called on the Kerry campaign to denounce the plan, which he said would make it "much easier for terrorists to be successful" in any planned attack on the city during the convention.

Neither Sen. Kerry nor Sen. Edwards has responded to King's comments.

Editor's note: