Blood and Politics (71 page)

The same weekend as the Kansas City meet, a preparedness expo opened at the Orlando convention center as if it were the main stage at Disney World. Over three days more than two thousand people parked in designated lots, dutifully rode the shuttle bus to the front doors, and gladly paid the six-dollar entrance fee. Much as at previous commercial survivalist events in Spokane, few seemed drawn by the chance to buy goods for such natural disasters as floods and hurricanes, although water purifiers, dried foods, and vitamins were for sale. Mylar ponchos stood in racks next to booths selling juice makers. Lectures on health issues drew a smattering of interest. But from the main stage and down the exhibition aisles a roll call of personalities from expos and militia-type meetings past stood end to end.
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Here again propaganda spielers campaigned against Fourteenth Amendment citizenship and advocated sovereign status, state citizenship, and militias. If you needed books on the Jews—from the ancient
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to more contemporary examinations of the Federal Reserve System—they were available not far from the bomb-making manuals and stacks of (empty) ammunition boxes. John Trochmann’s wife, Carolyn, distributed Militia of Montana literature from another table. Gun Owners of America executive Larry Pratt quietly sold memberships to his gun lobby like library cards for a Second Amendment reading room. When Pratt’s turn at the podium came, he counseled the crowd not to be intimidated by any associations with the militia. “After all, every time you read the [country’s] Founders they say something that makes them sound like they were a bunch of militia types,” he continued, because “that’s exactly what they were.”
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At an oversize exhibition table, Bo Gritz sold “preparedness” merchandise: a sixty-five-dollar belt buckle with a hidden six-inch knife blade and sixty-dollar videotapes that taught lock picking and other skills. If you stood at his table long enough, Gritz would start talking about his “constitutional covenant” community in Idaho, the same one he had previously described as a “Christian covenant” community before the bomb blast had heightened media attention to such events as these. Gritz also took the main stage on several different occasions during the weekend. Each time a loyal crowd of five hundred partisans paid the extra five-dollar fee to hear him blast the government’s flawed theory of the Oklahoma City bombing. More than any other speaker that weekend, Gritz contributed to a rearticulated sense that the movement was
the real victim in this postbombing world. He also felt assured enough of his own status at this event that he spent most of one lecture promoting organizations and personalities other than his own.
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“Friends, it’s time to stop talking and . . . start walking . . . I’m a life member of the NRA, but friends, that ain’t nothing. You get out there where somebody’s really doing something,” he told the crowd. “I want you to go out there and make sure you’re part of the Gun Owners of America.”
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In retrospect, the oft-asked question “Who really bombed Oklahoma City?” and the attendant conspiracy theories were almost naturally occurring events, like prayers for rain in a long drought. The sheer enormity of the crime created an almost knee-jerk disbelief in any simple explanation, whether offered by federal prosecutors or the FBI. Further, militia advocates, who hoped to influence the media and other pipelines to public opinion, were ever eager to pin the carnage back on the government, much as they had done with the Weaver case and Waco disaster. More, as part of a legal defense strategy, McVeigh’s chief attorney spent years trying to find John Doe Two and “others unknown,” often in off-the-track places such as the Philippines. And journalists, inquisitive and doubting by nature, found an embarrassing number of unanswered questions in the official explanations. These holes cried out to be filled, and reputable investigative reporters and disreputable poseurs alike rushed into the breach.
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The when, where, and how of the truck bomb’s construction, for example, remained unresolved. The FBI verified the fact that Terry Nichols had helped secure and store the fertilizer used in the bomb. But the claim that Nichols (and only Nichols) helped McVeigh construct the bomb never satisfied all objections. If McVeigh helped unload dozens of bags of fertilizer, empty them into barrels in the back of the Ryder truck, and stir into the mixture multiple gallons of fuel oil, then why did the FBI never find any telltale residue of fertilizer dust on McVeigh’s clothes?
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In another unsolved mystery, investigators had trouble learning the identity of the person connected to the remnants of a leg found at the bombing site, a leg clad in a military-style boot and camouflage boot blouse.
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And as weeks turned into months after McVeigh’s capture, the most enigmatic question remained: What had happened to John Doe Two, the dark-haired companion seen at the truck rental agency?

Much of the speculation about Doe Two (and possible Does Three and Four) swirled around Elohim City, the Christian Identity settlement
in northeastern Oklahoma that had quietly survived the post-Order federal sweep. The related outpost in Arkansas, James Ellison’s Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), had disbanded ten years before, but Robert Millar’s camp had prospered, supported in part by its own trucking company, a small sawmill, and livestock. And Elohim City had remained a safe harbor for movement cadres. After serving his federal prison sentence, Ellison had resettled there, marrying one of Millar’s young granddaughters. It was the permanent burial ground for Wayne Snell.
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Although Snell had been declared innocent at the seditious conspiracy trial, his murder convictions for the deaths of a black highway patrolman and a pawnshop owner had stood. Snell’s execution date had been scheduled for April 19 long in advance, and Robert Millar had ministered to the inmate at the end. Finally, just hours after the blast in Oklahoma City, Arkansas authorities put Snell to death. Afterward Millar drove the body from the prison in Texarkana to a hillside on the Elohim City property, and Snell was buried there.
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The possibility of a connection between Snell’s execution and the bombing intrigued investigators of every persuasion, particularly after it was learned McVeigh had his own possible connection to Elohim City. Just days before the bombing, McVeigh made a call to Elohim City and asked to talk with a man known to his American friends as “Andy the German.”
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At home in Berlin, he was Andreas Strassmeir. The son of a prominent conservative politician, he had served in the
Bundeswehr.
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According to an affidavit circulated by Lyons, Andy first came to the United States in 1988, went home, and then returned months after the bombing. Lyons claimed he met Strassmeir during a reenactment ceremony of the Battle of Gettysburg and later made the arrangements for him to live in Elohim City. The German immigrant apparently lived there (off and on) from at least 1991 until the summer of 1995.
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He bought a trailer home from the locals and began a small-time business, buying and selling militaria at gun shows. After Waco he helped the camp’s young men upgrade their weapons from hunting to assault rifles. When asked by reporters, he claimed that he didn’t really know McVeigh, that the two had only a short-lived commercial exchange at a gun show. When asked why McVeigh at the time of his arrest had a Strassmeir business card in his wallet, Andy answered that he did not know. As for the phone call from McVeigh, Andy said he had not been able to talk because he was at a neighbor’s working on a fence. He also claimed that he left Elohim City after a dispute with Millar over the latter’s welcome mat for Jim Ellison. It was at that point that Lyons and associates stepped in again and helped him quietly leave the country.
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In addition to the speculation surrounding Strassmeir, reports surfaced that several members of a small group calling themselves the Aryan Republican Army spent considerable amounts of time at Elohim City. Dubbed by the daily press the Midwest Bank Bandits, they hit twenty-two banks in Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, from October 1994 through December 1995. Forgoing the time-consuming work of opening vaults, they specialized in quick heists, jumping the teller counters, scooping the cash drawers, and leaving the premises within minutes. Typically, they left behind a diversionary device, such as a smoke grenade or a bomb look-alike, to assist their escape. They also wore a series of creative masks and costumes: a Santa Claus outfit at Christmastime, a Nixon mask on another robbery, and FBI ball caps and badges on a third. Despite the theatrical displays of deception, the net proceeds of this gang amounted to about $250,000.
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Led by Peter Langan and his principal partner, Richard Guthrie, the gang never included more than a half dozen bandits. They eluded law enforcement until Guthrie was captured in January 1996. Despite a friendship that dated back to their youth, Guthrie quickly led authorities to Langan, who was arrested in Ohio, after a brief shoot-out. From Langan, authorities recovered weapons, ammunition, and military ordnance. Disguises and the paraphernalia for creating false identifications were found. Among the guns, a small library attested to Langan’s literary preferences. The titles:
Around the World with Kipling
,
The Celtic Tradition
, and
Bullfinch’s Mythology.
Found too was the pamphlet
Our Nordic Race
and a book entitled
War Cycles, Peace Cycles
, both authored by propagandist Richard Kelly Hoskins. The authorities also recovered multiple copies of a videotape ostensibly produced as a recruiting tool. In the video, Langan, dressed in full gear, called himself Commander Pedro, waved a rifle, and spouted the usual rhetoric. The rest of the gang members were quickly arrested, and the Aryan Republican Army fell to stepped-up law enforcement operations after the Oklahoma City bombing. Guthrie confessed to nineteen of the holdups. He also handwrote a memoir while in jail, then hanged himself just days before he was slated to testify against the other bandits.
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During multiple trials in several states, an outline developed of the bank-robbing gang’s activities, including the fact that several of those charged had spent a considerable amount of time at Elohim City. Among them was Mike Brescia, a skinhead recruited from Philadelphia, who had shared a trailer with Andreas Strassmeir off and on for almost two years. It stretches the imagination to believe that Andy the German did not know of his roommate’s exploits. Several investigators, including a few militia types who wanted to pin the bombing on the Clinton administration,
stepped off the paved road of known facts and ventured up a rockier path of unknown conspiracies. First they decided that Brescia, dark-haired and olive-complexioned, was John Doe Two. If that was true, they concluded, then the connection between McVeigh and Strassmeir had to have been more than just a simple gun show exchange. Some also believed that Strassmeir was some sort of intelligence operative, planted in the United States with the unwitting help of Kirk Lyons. By these counts, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the feds had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing and had done nothing to stop it. Regardless of Strassmeir’s actual identity, however, this particular conspiracy theory hung by a single thin thread: Mike Brescia had to be John Doe Two. If Brescia was not Doe Two, or if Doe Two never existed, then the whole explanation fell apart.
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Years later, after McVeigh had been convicted at trial, his attorney, Stephen Jones, wrote a book on the case, titled
Others Unknown
, in which he recirculated several conspiracy theories that made his client look like a dupe rather than a fully aware perpetrator. A criminologist, Mark S. Hamm, in a book titled
In Bad Company
, argued strongly for the Brescia is Doe Two theory. These and other ideas recirculated later, when McVeigh and Nichols were tried in federal court.

“Mike Brescia is supposedly a dead ringer for John Doe 2,” a
Village Voice
reporter said to Robert Millar in 1996. “And I’m Santa Claus,” Millar replied. At the end all these theories required lots of speculation. And the speculation in this case went on without end.
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December 14, 1995.
The post–Oklahoma City bomb crackdown continued in Montana, where the U.S. attorney filed fraud and conspiracy charges against twelve members of the Freemen. For the feds, the white republic constructed in the minds of the Freemen was not an issue to be adjudicated. The main charges revolved around wire fraud, the creation of “worthless documents in the likeness of valuable and negotiable commercial instruments,” essentially a fake check-writing scam, and the interstate transfer of stolen goods. The IRS was among the dupes, actually accepting fraudulent checks written for more than the taxpayers owed. The agency paid back the “overage” in real dollars, in one case sending a check for fourteen thousand dollars to a California woman who owed eight thousand in back taxes. The Freemen tried to buy guns and ammunition with one million dollars in phony checks. They also tried to buy six trucks in Wyoming. Both the weapons and truck deals fell through.

The indictment’s fraud counts described the Freemen’s criminal artistry. But an indelicate thuggery weighted other charges, including the theft of camera equipment from a network news crew sent out to film on location. More than a dozen other charges involved firearms. And one of the overt acts cited in the conspiracy charge involved a late-night convoy on September 28, 1995. Five Freemen leaders—several already fugitives from other charges—accompanied by others armed with sidearms and assault-style rifles, had openly defied authorities and traveled from Musselshell County to Garfield County. Here, at a spot they called Justus Township, the Freemen took their last stand.