by Fred Rosen
Along with his partner, Salisbury Township Det. Richard Metzler, Vazquez headed out to Allentown Airport and caught the first flight to Michigan. If the cops in the north country caught his suspects alive, he wanted to be there when they were questioned.
THREE
Detroit is thought of the world over as “Motor City.” It is here that many of America’s automobile manufacturers are based and produce many of the tens of thousands of automobiles that find their way onto the world market every year.
But to others, Detroit is known in another way, as the beachhead of the White Supremacist movement in the United States. While places like Idaho and Montana garner greater headlines because of much-publicized, though isolated, conflicts with White Supremacists, it is in Detroit where Adolf Hitler’s racist dogma is being disseminated to the White Supremacists’ target audience: America’s disaffected youth. Detroit is the battleground in what White Supremacists describe as “rahowa,” or racial holy war.
Detroit is a city polarized by racial tensions. The city’s infrastructure has crumbled, leaving African Americans and other disenfranchised minorities to live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. And like their parents before them, they turn to music to express their rebellion.
Once it was the Beatles and the Stones; today it is Nordic Thunder and White Terror, hate rock bands.
Hate rock began in England.
Ian Stuart was a musician in British punk rock in the ’70s who’d put together a band called Skrewdriver. They signed on with a small label in Britain and opened for a lot of acts, including the Police and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Eventually, the neo-Nazi National Front, a white supremacist group, pushed Stuart to publicize his political thoughts to attract sympathetic fans. Stuart agreed.
In that agreement, the symbiotic relationship between neo-Nazi groups and what would later become known as “skinhead rock” was formed. While organizations that condemned Stuart set up a moratorium on his work, the National Front set up a record label called White Noise.
White Noise’s first CD was also Stuart’s first openly racist recording. Called “White Power,” it became the prototype for similar hate recordings to come. But distributing this type of music to a large audience in America proved daunting, until Resistance Records came along.
Resistance Records is based in Detroit. The company records white power bands, and distributes their CDs. Unlike other companies that have tried to do the same thing, Resistance is not a bunch of fringe-group amateurs. Its owners and founders, George Burdi and Mark Wilson, have come up with a way of marketing these CDs with top-notch promotion and packaging.
George Burdi’s own band, Rahowa, had an album out called “Declaration of War.” The label features a picture of a Nordic warrior, beefed up on steroids, towering over the corpse of a black man. The lyrics are equally concise.
Resistance Records sponsored a skinhead concert that took place in Racine, Wisconsin, on September 30, 1994. Three hundred hate rock fans met in Memorial Hall, a huge, cavernous space wired for sound.
On the bill were White Thunder, Rahowa, White Terror, and No Remorse.
The band members shrieked racial epithets from the stage, and the crowd shouted back in chorus. The concert closed with a selection from “No Remorse” entitled “Farewell, Ian Stuart.” A few of the other acts joined them onstage. Some of the crowd cried in mourning, because Stuart had recently died.
After the concert, while most drifted back to their cars, Joe Rowan, leader of the band Nordic Thunder, and a group of twenty to thirty skinheads decided to go out partying.
Racine is probably best known as the home of the Racine Belles, the first team to win the Women’s Professional Baseball League World Series in 1944, a feat immortalized in Penny Marshall’s film “A League of Their Own.” Its most recent notoriety came from what happened next.
Rowan and the skinheads went into a local convenience store called Starvin’ Marvin’s to buy beer and pretzels. They were on their way to a party in Hartford, about an hour northwest of Racine.
Their adrenaline still pumping from the concert, Rowan and the jackbooted skinheads began to trash the place. The clerk tripped a silent alarm and then went to the back room to wait for the cops to arrive.
When police got there, they found Rowan in the back of a pickup truck. Blood was leaking out of a bullet wound. The coroner later said it was a bullet through his back that had killed him. The concert-goers were still milling about, shouting that a black man, Gene Flood, who was walking away from the store, had killed Rowan.
The cops arrested Flood. He was later charged with first-degree homicide. But after a brief investigation, police discovered that Rowan and his buddies had traded insults and racial slurs with a few of the store’s black customers.
One of those customers was Gene Flood, who, fearing for his life, took out a gun and fired wildly, hitting Rowan, who was then taken outside and laid in the pickup truck to eventually die. Apparently none of the skinheads thought to call “911.”
The police later determined that it had been a self-defense shooting. Floyd was freed. But to the skinhead movement, regardless of the ignominious way Rowan had died, he was a martyr to the cause, a victim of the race war in America and the ascendancy of the mud people, those who were not “pure” white.
Death is a solemn right in the skinhead movement, and Rowan was immortalized. He had died for the rights of free white men everywhere to protect their white homeland against the “niggers” and “kikes.”
David, Bryan, and Benny looked at Detroit as it passed from view.
“Cool place, Detroit,” Bryan said.
“Yeah, our kind of people there,” David added.
Despite the dragnet that had been set out for them, they slipped through it easily. Despite the many police cruisers who passed them on their way north, not one stopped them. The Sunbird hurtled through the night, with the three teenagers wondering what was ahead of them. The idea began to drift into their consciousness that there was the possibility of being captured, but like all teenagers, they thought of themselves as immortal.
If anything did happen, they’d survive. Still, it would be smart to have a story ready for the cops, just in case. Since Ben was eighteen and could be tried as an adult, Bryan and David would take all the responsibility for the killings. As juveniles—Bryan was seventeen and David fifteen—they’d be tried as such. That’s what they figured.
As for Ben, he knew from his own legal problems that the penalties for a juvenile committing a crime were considerably lower that that of an adult.
“Not much jail time,” they reassured each other.
Another important point: While Pennsylvania had the death penalty, it had not been invoked for thirty years. There was no reason to believe it would be now. Besides, who ever heard of frying a kid, even for murder? It just didn’t happen.
Actually, it did. But the Freeman brothers knew even less about American criminal history than they did about current criminal law statutes in the state of Pennsylvania. So they’d worked things out, the two brothers and their cousin. They got their story straight.
Traveling north into Michigan on the interstate, they stopped only for gas and cigarettes a few times. In the homes they passed, night owls stayed up, channel-surfing with their remote controls. Someplace in the middle of all that channel surfing and all those thousands of people watching TV in the early-morning hours, there were some who saw CNN’s reports of the flight of the brothers Freeman and cousin Birdwell, the pursuit by Pennsylvania authorities, and the tension produced by the uncertainty of their capture.
In the news reports, the three were described as armed and dangerous skinheads with an obvious propensity toward violence.
By the time Benny and the Freemans entered the town of Midland, Michigan, at 6:50 A.M. on the morning of February 28, they were the most wanted fugitives in America.
“You know, it’s sort of early to call on Frank,” David said.
“Yeah, I gue
ss you’re right,” Brian answered.
“So let’s check into a hotel in the meanwhile,” Ben suggested.
Greg Pavledes was working the eleven-to-seven graveyard shift at the Holiday Inn in Midland, Michigan, when the skinheads walked in.
“We want a room for three,” said Benny Birdwell.
On the registration card, Benny wrote his name as “Mike Burr,” with an address on Susquehanna Street in Allentown, PA. The price of the room was $76.68, including tax. The boys reached into the pockets of their jeans and pulled out a big wad of five-dollar bills. After they’d paid, they went back to their car and proceeded to drive around to their room.
A short while later, Pavledes noticed that the one with the “Sieg heil” tattoo on his forehead, had reappeared.
“How do we get a key to the minibar in the room?” David Freeman asked.
Since they didn’t have a credit card, Greg asked him for a one-hundred-fifty-dollar cash deposit. David reached into his jeans and came out with a whole bunch of ones, fives, and quarters and proceeded to count out the deposit. Then Greg gave him the key.
Their size and their tattoos had given Greg the willies before, but it was the method of payment that made him really suspicious. It was highly unusual for someone to pay for the room and minibar all in cash, and with low denomination bills and change, at that.
After talking to the motel security guard, Greg called the Midland Police Department to report his suspicions. Officers Sam Delamater and his partner, Officer Peter Delgaudio, were dispatched to the motel. They met with the security guard at the front desk.
The clerk was concerned because three strange-looking young men with short hair and tattoos had checked into the hotel. They’d paid for their room in coins and small bills. The cops agreed to check it out.
Inside room 222, the three teenagers heard a sharp knock. They looked at each other. Who the hell did they know in this town?
“Who’s there?” one of them shouted back.
“Police!” Delamater shouted back.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber, Ben answered the door.
“What are you fellas doing here?” asked Officer Delamater.
“Just visiting,” Bryan said.
“And where’d you get those small bills you paid for the room with?” Officer Delgaudio asked.
“We’re waiters,” Benny answered smoothly. “We get a lot of small bills in tips.”
Delgaudio stepped into the room while Delamater remained at the door. The cop’s suspicious gaze roamed the room.
Bryan was in bed, the covers pulled all the way up to his chin. Within a minute, the toilet flushed and David came out of the bathroom. The cops could plainly see the words “Sieg Heil” tattooed on his forehead.
All of the boys appeared sober. There was no alcohol evident, no drugs. The only palpable odor in the room came from half-smoked cigarettes that smoldered in ashtrays. The cops continued to ask them questions. Benny did most of the talking.
When David and Bryan were addressed, they responded vaguely but politely.
“Why don’t you pull those covers down?” Delamater asked, looking over at Bryan. He wanted to be sure the kid wasn’t concealing a weapon.
“Sure,” Bryan said.
As the covers came down, exposing his body, naked save for his briefs, the cops could see that he was concealing something, but it wasn’t weapons.
Bryan’s body had been tattooed extensively with Nazi symbols. Across his chest were two blue-and-red chevrons. Inside the one on the left side of his chest was “SS,” the symbol of Hitler’s Storm Troopers.
Inside the chevron on the right was a swastika. Separating the two were the German words “Weiss macht.” The literal translation is “white makes free.”
Below the nipple on the right side was another swastika and a tattoo of what looked like a skull or a spider. It was impossible to tell without getting closer.
On Bryan’s right arm was a cartoonish figure that was half white and half dark. On his neck was a swastika made of bones. There was a “berserker” tattoo on his forehead.
“Those are pretty interesting tattoos,” Delgaudio said.
“Oh, you think so?” Benny said, brightening up.
One of them had cost Benny a thousand dollars. He proudly showed the cops his tattoos. He had a swastika on his left arm, an iron cross on his right, a Viking holding an ax on his forearm, the word “anarchy” tattooed on his right leg, and the word “berserker” across his low forehead.
In the process of his exhibiting himself, the cops noticed a cut in the webbing between his index finger and thumb.
“How’d you get that cut?” Delamater asked.
“Oh, I fell and cut it,” Benny answered nonchalantly.
“How old are you?” Delamater asked David.
“I’m eighteen,” David answered defensively.
“Well, you don’t look that old.”
“Well, I am,” David answered quietly.
To the officers’ credit, they were suspicious enough of the boys’ story to search the room and the car for contraband, any sort of illegal substances. Finding none, they ran the kids’ names through the police computer to see if there were any outstanding warrants. The Midland County prosecutor’s office would later claim that this check came up negative, that the bulletin on the search for the boys had not yet gone out.
“Have a good evening, boys,” Delamater said.
“Oh, we will, officer, we will,” Benny said.
They watched them get into their squad car and leave.
“Boy, those cops are dumb,” Bryan said.
“And how,” Benny chimed in.
“Let’s go see Frank,” Bryan said.
“And party,” David added.
Though he spelled it differently, August Hesse had a special place in the white supremacy movement. His surname was similar to that of Hitler’s chief of staff and confidante, Rudolf Hess. But unlike Hess, who parachuted into Britain during the early days of World War II in a misguided attempt to make peace, peace was the last thing on August Hesse’s mind in December 1994.
Hesse had been shopping in a store in Midland, Michigan, when a black man had walked in. After shouting racial epithets at the man, Hesse threatened to kill him. Police were called, and Hesse proceeded to fight with them until he was taken into custody.
Down at the station house, Hesse was charged with ethnic intimidation and resisting and obstructing a police officer. When the Freemans and Birdwell rolled into Midland, August Hesse was still awaiting trial. He would later plead guilty to the charges against him and be sentenced to a year in jail.
The countryside around Midland, Michigan, is verdant, but not in winter. Then it is a bleak place, the land lying wan, sometimes covered by snow, as it was on February 28, 1995. The Hesse property was in a rural area of Midland County, composed mostly of farms, where decent middle-class people tried to make a living off the land.
On the property was the main house, where Frank Hesse lived with his brother, August, and his father, Ronald. In the house were mailings from some of the country’s neo-Nazi groups. The Hesse brothers appeared to be avid subscribers. While the Hesses had no direct links to neo-Nazi groups, prosecutors would later claim that in their basement were the makings for incendiary pipe bombs. As a kind of signature, someone had scrawled racial epithets on the pipes.
Down the road was the framework of a house that Frank had been painstakingly constructing for months. Frank Hesse, tall, handsome, with close-cropped hair and big hands, had gone down the road to work on his house. He was there, busily hammering nails into wood, when his father called down from the main house.
“Hey Frank, Frank.”
His father’s voice carried on the wind, a full quarter-mile down to where Frank was. He looked up.
“You got visitors,” his father continued.
Frank put down his tools, wiped his hands on his jeans, and strolled out to the road. As he walked up the hill to t
he house, he saw three guys standing outside a Pontiac. One of them he recognized.
“Hey, Bryan, you made it,” he said with a ready smile, extending his hand in greeting to Bryan Freeman.
They shook hands, and Bryan quickly introduced David and Ben. Frank had never met either before, and while David seemed an easy, laid-back sort of fellow, Ben Birdwell immediately gave Frank the creeps.
“Well, like I said,” Bryan related, “we took off from work and came up to, you know, hang out.”
“That’s great,” Frank said. He always had a welcoming hand out to a fellow skin. He could not deny them the hospitality of his home.
“Come on inside,” he told them brightly.
They went inside, had a few beers, and Frank showed them where to stow their gear. They appeared to be traveling light.
A little later in the day, he took them down the road to show them the house he was building. They helped in putting up some beams, but they didn’t seem to be much good with their hands, especially Ben.
Back at the house that evening, Frank showed the boys his gun collection. He hunted game with rifles. Ben seemed particularly interested in his assault rifle. Ben went on about how good a hunter he was, what a dead shot he was, digressing to other areas where he was superior. What a braggart this guy is, Frank thought.
At no time during their stay with Frank did either Freeman brother or their cousin give any indication of what had happened back home. All three stuck to their story that they had gotten off work and just felt like taking a little road trip.
That night, Frank took them “malling,” the all-American pastime of going to the local mall, eying the girls and boys, window shopping, and repetitive walking up and down the corridors of commercialism. When they returned back to the Hesse house, it was about 9 P.M.
Frank broke out six-packs of beer. The boys proceeded to polish off the cans one by one. Frank let them listen to some of his music. Ordinarily, Frank liked to listen to country more than skinhead music, but his guests were into skinhead rock, and Frank was nothing if not a polite host.
