Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

by Jess Walter

  In ten years, Richard Butler had risen to a sort of distinguished professorship in the white supremacy movement, one of a handful of grand old men who passed the hatred and fear along to a new generation of skinheads and state prisoners. By 1983 he claimed six thousand members of the Aryan Nations in the United States, three hundred of them in northern Idaho. The goal of the Aryan Nations was simple: to establish a white homeland in the northwest, preferably great slabs of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. On any given Sunday, as many as forty people might fill the swastika-decorated church to hear Butler—grandfatherly in his blue suit with the Aryan Nations arm patch—preach his Christian Identity beliefs. And, every month, it seemed, another family with such views moved to North Idaho, some drawn by Butler’s church.

  But as he listened to the Reverend Butler and heard from people in the area, Wayne Manis became less concerned about what was going on at the Aryan Nations compound and more worried about what was going on outside it.

  ABOUT TWO WEEKS after Randy and Vicki Weaver discovered their mountain retreat, a splinter group of Aryan Nations members was meeting in a corrugated steel barn just on the other side of the Selkirk Mountains, in Metaline Falls, Washington. Home to fewer than 300 people, Metaline Falls was a close cousin to towns like Naples and Bonners Ferry. In late September 1983, it was also the home of a disillusioned white guy named Bob Mathews, who gathered eight other men—Aryan Nations members and supporters—in the metal barn he’d recently built, on whose concrete steps were etched a swastika and the words: “White Pride, White Unity, White America.” Inside the barn, Mathews, another escapee from mainstream America, was laying out his plan for the violent overthrow of the Zionist Occupied Government.

  The men repeated an oath to “deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.” They swore, as Aryan warriors, “to complete secrecy to The Order and total loyalty to my comrades.” They called themselves the “Bruders Schweigen,” German for “Silent Brotherhood.” About a month later, members committed their first crime in the name of the great race war, robbing an adult bookstore in Spokane of $369. The group quickly became more proficient criminals and began counterfeiting money to finance their revolution. Still, by the end of 1983, no one outside the group even knew there was a gang of criminal white supremacists.

  By June 1984, word was getting out. Members of the Bruders Schweigen robbed a bank and hit an armored car in Seattle, getting away with $500,000; others bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho; others murdered a man they considered to be a security risk in North Idaho; and some executed Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg in Denver. The group reached its zenith on July 19, 1984, when Mathews and eleven other members of the Bruders Schweigen robbed an armored car in Ukiah, California, escaping with more than $3 million.

  In many ways, 1983 and 1984—when Randy and Vicki were just getting settled on Ruby Ridge—were the high point for white separatists and supremacists in the Northwest. The Aryan Nations was attracting welcome publicity for its cross burnings and for a rally it staged in Spokane’s Riverfront Park. The 1983 and 1984 Aryan world congresses at Hayden Lake brought big crowds, and Butler’s church was at its peak of influence in the far right. Sentiment against the government was growing, and scores of people with radical right-wing beliefs were making their way to North Idaho from other parts of the country. Meanwhile, this group of Aryan warriors—the Bruders Schweigen, or The Order, as they were also called—was raking the countryside, preparing for the great race war.

  A fringe member of the Bruders Schweigen had been caught passing a phony ten-dollar bill in Philadelphia, and—keyed by Wayne Manis’s investigation and the Philadelphia man’s testimony—the FBI began to unravel the group. Dozens of FBI agents were called to the Northwest, and the investigation of the Aryan Nations—specifically The Order—became the number-one priority in the country for the FBI.

  In November 1984, the first member of The Order was arrested, after the informant told the FBI where Mathews and another member were hiding. After a gun battle with twenty FBI agents in Portland, Oregon, Mathews got away, but another member, Gary Yarbrough, was arrested, and The Order continued to crumble. A few weeks later, on December 7, four more members were arrested, and federal agents surrounded a house on Whidbey Island, in Washington’s Puget Sound. Inside, Mathews was waiting for them. They negotiated, pleaded, and fired back and forth for thirty-six hours. Snipers, helicopters, and bullhorns did no good. Mathews would only leave if the Zionist Occupied Government guaranteed him a white homeland. Finally, with negotiations going nowhere, federal agents decided to finish the standoff. They fired three flares into the house, hoping to smoke Mathews out. It didn’t work. A frustrated Wayne Manis watched the house burn to the ground. They found Mathews burned to death, curled up in a bathtub. Afterward, there was little talk of Mathews’s civil rights, except among the radical right.

  By January 1985, the FBI was rounding up the rest of the Bruders Schweigen and Manis’s office was packed with dozens of agents tracing all the leads in the case. Tips were stacking up in the FBI office in Coeur d’Alene. Sometime that winter, a report was floated onto Wayne Manis’s desk about a white separatist who had no known connection to The Order, but who was making a lot of noise in Boundary County. So Manis tagged a young agent who’d been sent from Indiana to help and passed along the name of a new figure in their far-reaching investigation, a woodcutter from Iowa named Randy Weaver.

  KENNETH WEISS HAD BEEN an FBI agent for only three years when he was transferred from Indiana to Coeur d’Alene and assigned to the biggest investigation in the country, The Order. With so many agents involved, one of Weiss’s tasks was to go through a long list—names of people with some minor connection, sometimes no connection, to the larger case that was unfolding. One of those names was Randy Weaver. The disgruntled neighbor Terry Kinnison had gone to the Boundary County sheriff with his allegations against Weaver, and the sheriff had quickly called the FBI.

  Four feet of snow covered the Idaho mountains in the winter of 1984/85, and if Randy Weaver was going to be a threat to the president, he was going to have to figure out some way to get down from his mountain. And if federal agents wanted to talk to him, they were going to have to figure out some way to get a message up to him. They finally found a friend of the Weavers to snowmobile up with the word, and in February, Randy and his wife came down and met Weiss, another FBI agent, two Secret Service agents, and a sheriff’s investigator at the sheriff’s office in Bonners Ferry. Weiss had already interviewed Kinnison, who maintained that Randy was a threat to any federal employee and had even talked of killing the president. He’d said Randy’s mentor for his far-right-wing beliefs was a guy named Frank Kumnick. Weiss also interviewed Sam Wohali, who said Randy was obnoxious but probably wasn’t going to kill Ronald Reagan unless the president hiked up onto his land and started hassling him in the name of the New World Order. Now Weiss sat down with Randy and Vicki Weaver and asked point-blank, “Did you ever intend to assassinate the president or other government officials?”

  Weiss and the other agents were subjected to Randy and Vicki’s tale of backbiting and feuds and land problems and setups and plots fomented against them by a broad conspiracy of neighbors. “I got no time for Aryan Nations preachers,” Weaver said. His beliefs were “strictly by the Bible.” He said the Bible gave him the right to kill, if necessary, to defend his family, but that federal authorities were welcome on his land, despite all the rumors about him.

  By the time he left Bonners Ferry that day, Weiss had concluded there was no reason to interview Randy Weaver again, and the case was basically closed. Back in Coeur d’Alene, Manis was keeping tabs on scores of radical right wingers in North Idaho, and the briefing on Randy went into that “mental hopper.”

  “We were aware of him,” Manis said later. “He was a very outspoken separatist who lived in a remote cabin and made it very public to the community his views about the government.” But Manis found no strong connect
ion between Weaver and the Aryan Nations, let alone the dangerous Bruders Schweigen. He filed Randy Weaver’s name away with those people who had radical views but weren’t breaking the law. Yet.

  LIKE THE FBI, the people of Idaho fought back against the racists. In 1982, after a Los Angeles woman with three racially mixed children was harassed by a member of Butler’s church, some community members quickly formed the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations to provide a TV counterweight to the neo-Nazis and white separatists.

  After convincing the North Idaho business community that the Aryan publicity was bad for tourism, the group became influential, holding meetings and demonstrations and constantly pointing out to the news media how small the Aryan presence was in northern Idaho. Their biggest accomplishment was helping to convince the Idaho legislature in 1983 to pass a law making it a felony to intimidate anyone because of their race.

  At the Aryan Nations compound, Butler and his followers saw the “Inhuman Rights Task Force” differently. Their pressure on the business community made it nearly impossible for Aryan Nations members to hold down jobs and dissuaded people who might otherwise have come to Butler’s white homeland. Suddenly, there was a stigma attached to being a member of the Aryan Nations.

  But the real pressure was coming from law enforcement. And it wasn’t just the FBI. Competitive police and sheriff’s departments had their informants, the FBI had its informants, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms its own informants. At some meetings, half the participants were reporting to some agency or another.

  And the federal officers that set out to investigate the growing radical right weren’t the same ones who had battled the Ku Klux Klan in the South. The FBI, for instance, was no longer Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and his competent G-men, cleaning up on bank robbers and radical leftists. In the wake of Watergate-era revelations about the FBI’s violation of civil rights—especially in its investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr.—the chief federal law enforcement agency was hamstrung by new laws that limited its infiltration of groups like the Aryan Nations. And so, the FBI had been caught off guard by The Order. Afterward, the bureau wasn’t going to be surprised again, and so it began using informants, usually other criminals whom they turned and convinced to spy on their friends.

  In 1983 and 1984, the radical right was the biggest concern of the ATF as well. In just twenty-five years, ATF had gone from 1,000 agents whose prime mission was to break up whiskey stills in the South to an armed force of 4,300, charged with keeping tabs on the skyrocketing number of weapons in the United States. Guns were the currency of doomsday cults, white separatists, and tax evaders, and increasingly, ATF—a federal agency founded to deal with contraband cigarettes and booze—was bumping up against the fringe of American society.

  And its informants were bumping up against the FBI’s informants. ATF spies gave reports on FBI spies, neither knowing what the other one was doing. At one meeting of three white separatists, two of them were federal plants. The growing competition between the FBI—a Justice Department agency—and the ATF—under the Treasury Department—spilled over so that neither side was telling the other what it was doing.

  But there were results. Arrests were made left and right. The cases were dreams for federal prosecutors. Just say the words white supremacist, detail some of the bizarre beliefs, and you were halfway to conviction. American juries, like the public at large, seemed to understand that such dangerous people needed to be dealt with, and they looked the other way. In a nation desperate to purge itself of its racist history, law enforcement enjoyed the sort of freedom to investigate and prosecute white supremacists that it normally had only with drug gangs and the Mafia. The weapons they used were the same: criminal informants, undercover agents, surveillance, and broad charges like racketeering, sedition, weapons violations, and tax fraud—legal sleights of hand that broke the silence of conspirators and often culled convictions from what might have been weak cases otherwise.

  IN APRIL 1985, The Order defendants—twenty-three disgruntled white men and one woman—were indicted on conspiracy and racketeering charges, in all, sixty-seven separate counts, the kind of elaborate web usually reserved for the Mafia. Twenty-two Order members had been caught by then, and they were chained and bolted to the floor during the sixteen-week trial, which ended with an impressive record: twelve guilty pleas, ten convictions—twenty-two for twenty-two. As with the Mafia and drug lords, turning one Aryan against the others was the best weapon in prosecuting them. In the end, more than half the defendants testified against their “brothers.” It was a valuable lesson for law enforcement and for the third-chair attorney in the case, a young assistant U.S. attorney named Ron Howen, a driven, no-frills federal prosecutor with a reputation for rejecting almost every plea bargain that landed on his desk. After The Order trial, white supremacists became Ron Howen’s metier.

  A few months later, Howen was prosecuting Elden “Bud” Cutler, the security chief for the Aryan Nations, who was arrested and charged with hiring a hit man to kill Thomas Martinez, the FBI informant who broke The Order. Unfortunately, the hit man Cutler hired to behead Martinez was an FBI agent who had infiltrated the group.

  Howen handled the prosecution. A young attorney named David Nevin, who was raised on the other side of a black neighborhood in Louisiana and who grew up abhorring racism, was Cutler’s defense attorney. But to Nevin, Cutler’s beliefs—no matter how awful—were beside the point. This was a classic case of entrapment, sending an FBI agent to a simple man and coaxing him into paying to have someone killed. But Howen laid out the intricate kind of case he’d participated in with The Order, tying Cutler’s beliefs into the conspiracy to kill the informant. Still, Nevin thought he had a chance, until the government played a tape of his client looking at a doctored picture of Martinez that purported to show him after he’d been decapitated. “Goddamn,” Cutler said. “You guys really did it.” It didn’t help Nevin’s case that his client wanted a copy of the picture. So Howen won another one, sending Cutler away for twelve years. “Usually, my clients don’t commit their crimes on videotape,” Nevin said. “It makes it tough to present a defense.”

  Howen wasn’t done with white separatist prosecutions, but he wouldn’t face David Nevin again in such a case for seven years, when they’d face off in U.S. v. Randall Weaver and Kevin Harris.

  IN AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER 1986, five small bombs rocked the trendy resort town of Coeur d’Alene, including one that damaged the home of the Reverend Bill Wassmuth, one of the leaders of the Kootenai County Human Rights Task Force. Other bombs slightly damaged the federal courthouse and three businesses.

  Within a few weeks, four people were in custody, charged with counterfeiting, bombings, and murder. Like a bad action movie, they called themselves The Order II. They were much less organized and efficient, and authorities bragged that they’d been stopped much earlier. The key to the case had been a confidential informant.

  Richard Butler couldn’t keep track of all the informants running around his compound. He had to worry about outright FBI agents, ATF agents and cops working undercover, private investigators and thrill-seekers working on behalf of law enforcement, and real Aryans who had gotten in trouble and had been convinced that testifying about their friends was better than spending the rest of their lives in prison.

  It was the latter breed of informant who broke The Order II. Again, Ron Howen handled the prosecution, drawing out the same sort of elaborate racketeering indictment that had been successful with The Order. And again, Howen used the beliefs of the group to create an unmistakable web of criminal acts, each committed to further a broad conspiracy—namely, to overthrow the government of the United States. It was a detailed, masterly prosecution and the blueprint for how to convict white separatists.

  Yet these people sprouted like chokeweed, and as soon as you arrested one, another seemed to take his place. Law enforcement responded by sending in informants and snitches, who returned with more bad news. There w
ere indications everywhere that there was a movement to finish the job The Order had started. For instance, the bombings themselves seemed to have sprung from the collective anger at the 1986 Aryan Nations World Congress.

  IT WAS LIKE A RACIST All-Star game. Randy Weaver and Frank Kumnick walked through the gates of the Aryan Nations in the summer of 1986 to find almost every racist right-wing leader who wasn’t in prison. All the giants milled about the Aryan Nations’ pristine Hayden Lake compound: William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the tract that had been used as an outline for The Order and would be used again more than a decade later for the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City; Tom Metzger of San Diego’s White Aryan Resistance, a role model for skinheads across the United States; Bill Albers of Modesto, California, Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; Thorn Robb, national chaplain of the KKK; John Ross Taylor, known as the elder statesman of Canadian anti-Semitism; Terry Long, a forty-year-old “high Aryan warrior priest” trying to establish a white homeland in Calgary; and the two religious voices of the movement, pastors Robert Miles of Michigan and Richard Butler. Also there were the wives of the dead or imprisoned martyrs: Order members Mathews and Richard Scutari, and James Ellison, founder of The Covenant, The Sword & The Arm of The Lord in Missouri.

  There were informants at the congress, too, poorly dressed guys from the FBI, the ATF, and local police and sheriff’s departments. Most of the informants didn’t even know who the other informants were, and they milled throughout a crowd of a couple hundred people, taking mental notes of who seemed ready to take over where The Order had left off.