Blood and Politics (29 page)

The judicial district of this federal court encompassed most of northwestern Arkansas. Within these counties, Gordon Kahl’s final firefight had taken place, and the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord had launched its final battles. Bob Weems had made that Populist Party speech in a state park. Except for an artists’ colony in Eureka Springs and the university at Fayetteville, the region’s towns and villages were culturally conservative and fervently fundamentalist Christian. An unreconstructed passion play was still being produced on an outdoor stage each summer.
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While 10 percent of the city of Fort Smith’s seventy thousand inhabitants were black, the surrounding counties in the district were virtually all white. Robb’s traveling Klan show had been ill received, however.

At Ozark, a town of twenty-five hundred, white Arkansans had visibly opposed the Klan. “At rally time . . . the pickup trucks rolled in fully loaded with rowdy Ozarkians ready to stomp,” complained one Klansman.
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The local anti-Klanners shouted down Robb’s attempt to give a speech and forced his outfit to pack up and leave. In nearby Alma a different crowd also gave the Klan a hard time. Here local white Christian ministers led the opposition. “A large group of Judeo-Christians equipped with crude placards and led by wild eyed ministers,” the same Klansman moaned, “again tried to shout down the sound system.”
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At that point, it had been decades since white supremacists mounted a public defense campaign prior to trial. Nothing had been done to influence the potential jury pool before the Seattle racketeering trial. And during all the crackdown cases afterward, nobody had lifted a finger to win sympathy for the defendants prior to trial. Although his tactics were limited by his organizational imagination, Robb pioneered a trail used again later when a man named Randy Weaver faced charges.

Nine months prior to the demonstrations, when the indictments were first issued, Robb had tried to make himself the voice of free speech. “The government is attempting to silence those individuals who disagree with the government-supported policies of homosexuality, race-mixing, secular humanism, abortion and Zionism,” he said. “Surely you can see that Pastor Miles and Butler were not indicted for an illegal act or a violent crime, but were indicted because the government wanted to silence” them.
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He had also published a Klan tabloid devoted to a defense of Butler, Beam, and Miles. “There have been some people who have committed illegal acts or violent crimes that were also associated with the Christian Identity Movement, Aryan Nations or Ku Klux Klan,” he wrote. “Is it really fair to condemn all the members of the above because of the actions of a few?” he asked.
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Throughout this campaign, Robb distinguished between the three Aryan generals and their codefendants, the blood-splattered soldiers, who were already serving long jail terms. On this point, as well as many others, Tom Metzger from California emerged as a counterpoint to Thom Robb’s narrowly constructed free speech defense. Metzger had traveled beyond Duke’s Klan and electioneering to ever more provocative forms of activism. He had used the technological know-how he had garnered in his occupation as a television repairman to pioneer the movement’s use of community access cable television in the mid-1980s, and one of his first guests was a soon-to-be member of The Order, Frank Silva.
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Along with Louis Beam, Metzger had been one of the first to use computer bulletin boards—several years before the Internet became a mass phenomenon.
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And he published a tabloid five or six times a year, amplifying his voice across the country. During that last pretrial rally in Fort Smith, Metzger marched with a white armband reading remember whidbey island over his dark suit. By invoking the site of Order founder Robert Mathews’s fiery death, Metzger asked that the protesters support all the defendants at the trial—even those Robb considered bad apples. “I went not just for the three, but for all prisoners who are loyal to their race,” Metzger explained. “I was taken aside by conservative right wing Thom Robb and told I could speak, but not for the other prisoners.” Metzger concluded that Robb and others were “trojan horses” and unprincipled “mailing list milkers,” eager only to raise funds. He decided not to speak from the platform at all rather than muzzle his support for the other defendants.
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The conflict between Robb and Metzger spilled over into a meeting. The featured speaker was Ed Fields, the Atlanta-area publisher who had reveled in the chaos in Forsyth County the year before. If these men could be convicted for speaking out against the admittedly powerful influence organized Jewry held over the government, he claimed, well, then just about any free man could be charged with sedition.
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In the dispute over how many of the defendants to support, Fields had already aligned himself with Robb and against Metzger. Fields claimed The Order “had no official connection with any legitimate Right Wing organization” and drew a line between Mathews’s bandits and the
movement as a whole. “No legitimate Patriotic Christian group condones any of the action taken by The Order. The conspiracy here is on the part of the Justice Dept. to overtly FRAME three innocent men by putting them on trial with the ‘
bad apples
,’” Fields had written in his tabloid.
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During the trial Fields even testified for the defense that he initially thought that Robert Mathews was a government agent sent to disrupt his movement.
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Fields was simply rewriting his own history. Just three years before, he had issued a special tabloid edition memorializing Bob Mathews with bold headlines: “His Legend Had Just Begun.” At that time Fields lionized Mathews. He published a favorable summary of Mathews’s movement career, reprinted his last testament in full, interviewed his widow, Debbie, and declared the “public idolized Bob Mathews.” Now Fields acted as if he had never written any of that.
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Like Fields, Robb tried to have it both ways. “Some thought that by my limiting myself to defense of Pastor Butler, Pastor Miles, and Louis Beam I was condemning the men of The Order,” Robb wrote. “We had long disagreed with the methods of The Order, but have never condemned the spirit, the zeal or will of those men and the courage they displayed.” If he wanted to inherit Butler’s spot at the top of Aryan Nations, Robb had to reconcile his short-term trial strategy with the avant-garde’s larger objectives. He tried: “I have always defended The Order members even though I have been equally critical of their method.”
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In contrast to Fields and Robb’s double-talk, Tom Metzger’s single-minded militance that day attracted skinhead marchers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Minnesota as well as several of Robb’s own top state dragons. In addition to a shared contempt for Robb’s market-driven opportunism, they all despised the market itself. Metzger was the vanguardists’ vanguardist, ensconced in his own sectarian principles, which he treated with religious-like devotion. He was certain that the conservative white Arkansans who would form the jury pool would similarly follow their religious convictions—into the government’s arms.

“Why did the vermin feds hide this trial in Ft. Smith where the jury will undoubtedly be made up of Bible-beating Falwell types who tend to believe every statement that comes from the mouth of ZOG,” Metzger asked, “why not L.A., San Francisco or other cities where people are more prone to be suspicious?”
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In this rift over pretrial public strategy, Robert Miles and Richard Butler took a slightly different tack, directed more to their own followers than the broader public. They weren’t the only ones going to trial, they argued. The entire movement was. A “concerted, orchestrated program
of intentional criminal harassment of the white racial movements” was afoot, Butler warned. If the prosecution succeeded, he worried, “it will leave us barren and naked before the enemy. The rebuilding process will be long and painful.”
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Robert Miles extended the impact of impending events beyond his own movement to the entire right wing: from conservatives such as the Reverend Pat Robertson, who supported Israel, to dissidents opposed to immigration and gun control. “If we lose, the so-called rightwing will be lost as far as its effectiveness is concerned . . . Let the kosher rightwing understand that all of its rhetoric about the Constitution and the laws, will avail them nothing once we who are their spearhead are broken.”
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More than Butler or Pierce, Miles consciously projected his own subcult as the narrow vanguard of a much broader right wing.

Miles’s wife, Dorothy, reached even further. If the government succeeded in convicting her husband at Fort Smith, then all government opposition of every kind would be lost. “If the right wing loses this fight, then all Americans will have lost too,” she wrote in a fund-raising letter. It seemed a hyperbolic claim, but she’d seen the force imperiling her movement at work before. “The left has already been stilled, either by incarceration, financially breaking them or even by adopting some of their stands.”
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She feared white nationalists would be silenced through a similar combination of incarceration and co-optation.

At the same time, Butler and Miles mixed bravado in with their fears about the future. “Does ZOG realize how truly honorable it is in times like these to be charged with sedition,” the Aryans asked. They talked as if each were a Nathan Hale on the way to the British gallows, rather than two retired engineers whose blueprints for racial chaos had finally been taken seriously by the cops. “The pleasure of making the trial scene, giving opening and closing arguments to a jury that we have helped to choose . . . cross-examining ZOG’s perjured witnesses,” they wrote, “. . . all of this appeals to us.”
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They did not know then what they learned later: how much would turn in fact on those alleged “perjured witnesses.”

February 16, 1988.
The courtroom was medium size, better suited for prosecuting interstate car theft rings than far-reaching conspiracies to overthrow the federal government. The narrow elevator to the third floor chamber seemed to reinforce feelings of routine inconsequence. Across the street from the federal courthouse, a statue commemorating Confederate Civil War veterans stood on the Sebastian County courthouse grounds as an icon of a remembered past. An American flag flew nearby. Erected during the early years of the twentieth century by the Daughters of the Confederacy, similar statues grace the landscape at county courthouses across the Old South. In 1861, after state troops had seized Fort Smith’s armory, Arkansas had seceded from the United States.
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Presiding U.S. District Judge Morris Arnold seemed intent on keeping dramatic flourishes to a minimum and the judicial calendar un-clogged. Thirty reporters from across the country recorded the trial’s opening moments, but after the first week it became simply a local story with a wire service feed. The judge picked the jury with less care than he might have chosen apples at a grocery. Dispensing with any meaningful voir dire, he questioned the ninety-eight jury prospects himself. The defense’s preemptory challenges removed the half dozen black people in the pool. In less than one day an all-white jury was chosen to decide the first seditious conspiracy case against self-avowed racists since World War Two. Ten men and two women, representing a thin slice of blue-collar life, sat in rows on the judge’s right-hand side.
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The prosecution’s table was commanded by veteran adversaries of the movement’s violent vanguard. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Snyder had managed this case from the first grand jury witnesses. Snyder was backed by Jack Knox, the FBI agent who had investigated white
supremacists since the Gordon Kahl shoot-out in 1983. An additional special consulting attorney was shipped in from Washington, D.C. And when the occasion demanded it, U.S. Attorney Mike Fitzhugh made a guest appearance. Prosecutors planned to call two hundred witnesses, introduce twelve hundred pieces of evidence, and overwhelm the defense during a trial they expected to take three months. The judge soon cut those numbers in half.
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The defense team sat in U-shapes around their tables; fourteen defendants crowded in with their attorneys. Fourteen federal marshals stood nearby. One by one the accused faced their judge and jury.

Robert Miles was their natural leader. He managed to maintain an august presence despite the obvious wear endured by his sixty-two-year-old body since being indicted. The government’s case placed him at the center of the conspiracy as a whole. His loyal wife, Dorothy, who had survived his six-year imprisonment in the 1970s with the fortitude of a soldier’s wife, sat behind the gate with other visitors each day. N. C. Deday LaRene, Miles’s quick-witted attorney from Detroit, dominated the courtroom floor and quickly became the defense team’s commanding figure.

Richard Butler, at age seventy and with a history of heart trouble, looked even more worn than Miles. Like Miles, Butler stayed with his prim wife, Betty, in rented rooms not far from the courthouse. After escaping prosecution in every other Order-related criminal proceeding, he now faced the most serious charges of his racist career. His main street Idaho attorney, Everett Hoffmeister, focused on proving that the aging Aryan was more a spiritual leader to his congregants than a warrior himself. Would a Catholic priest be indicted if one of his parishioners had bombed an abortion clinic? Hoffmeister asked.
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Unlike Miles and Butler, who were free on bail, Louis Beam was brought from the jail to the courthouse in chains each day. Of the three most prominent figures charged with leading the seditious conspiracy, he was the only one to speak on his own behalf and question witnesses. Dressed in a dapper business suit, Beam seemed most conscious of the drama in progress: homeboy with the jury, deferential to the judge, and suspicious of prosecution witnesses. He acted at times like William Wallace of Scotland defying the king of England. At other points he adopted the chivalrous pose of Robert E. Lee surrendering his sword. Beam was flanked by his two attorneys, one court-appointed and the other his friend from Texas Kirk Lyons.