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

by Jess Walter

  “Hey, Gus, how you been?”

  “Good, Randy. How about you?”

  The informant Ken Fadeley said he’d been too busy to come in 1988. They talked a little and Randy introduced “Gus” to some friends from out of town who’d come for the congress. The biker asked where Kumnick was, and Randy said they’d had a falling out.

  “Give us a call sometime, Gus,” Randy said.

  He was supposed to be watching some of the Aryan leaders here, not a fringe associate like Weaver, but Ken Fadeley figured he’d keep in touch with him, just to keep an eye on what he and Kumnick might be doing.

  “Yeah,” Fadeley said. “If I get a chance, I’ll come up and say hi.”

  IN AUGUST, Ken Fadeley drove his Nissan Sentra through Naples, a couple miles north on the old highway, where he pulled off the road and into the driveway of the little red rental house. Fadeley was impressed. The house was nice, the yard well kept, and a new Ford Ranger pickup truck sat in the driveway. Even though Randy had complained about money at the world congress, it looked as if he was doing okay. It was a beautiful summer day, and the mountains behind the house framed it with lush green.

  “It’s good to see ya,” Randy said.

  “This is a pretty nice place.”

  “Thanks.”

  As they started for the house, Fadeley was surprised to see Frank Kumnick step outside. He thought there was a rift between Kumnick and Weaver.

  “Well, hi Gus,” Kumnick said. “How are you?”

  Inside, Fadeley felt some tension between the Weavers and Frank Kumnick. From the kitchen, Vicki Weaver offered to cook Fadeley anything he wanted. She made some chicken soup and they small-talked, Randy and Vicki returning to their favorite subject: Scripture. They had some cookies and coffee and talked about how unimpressed they all were with Butler’s gathering that year. “The same old rhetoric,” Randy said.

  Those old guys always repeated themselves, they agreed.

  Then, out of nowhere, Kumnick and Randy got into it, arguing about where the Weavers had gotten the money for the new truck and the rental of the little house and the other things they’d been buying. Fadeley thought it might even turn violent.

  Randy couldn’t believe it. He was pissed off, and Fadeley backed him up. “It’s nobody’s damned business,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Randy said. As the argument heated up, Vicki began crying, curled up in a chair in the living room, saying she was tired of all the rumors.

  Finally, Kumnick left. Fadeley walked him out, and they made an appointment to meet at a restaurant in Bonners Ferry later that day. When Fadeley returned to the house and told Randy that he was meeting Kumnick later, Randy said Frank wasn’t trustworthy anymore.

  “Frank’s too radical,” Randy said. He said he didn’t want Frank to know what he and “Gus” were talking about. Frank and his wife had been their closest friends in Idaho, Randy said. And now he couldn’t be trusted. “He’s gone off the deep end.”

  The Weavers had lost another set of close friends, in fact the oldest friends they had in Boundary.

  Before Fadeley left, he testified later, Randy launched into some bizarre speech about how he was being prepared for something by God, being set up to do something big for the white race. And then the children came running inside, saying the dog was about to have puppies, and so Fadeley made his way out, although he and Randy set up another appointment, this time to talk business.

  After the August meeting, Fadeley talked with Byerly about where to go next in their investigation of white separatists. They had some fourteen hours of tape on Kumnick, but the only crime they had on him was a sawed-off rifle that Fadeley said Kumnick sold him. Since all the craziness with the kidnapping plot and the talk of Super Glue and stripping federal agents, Kumnick was keeping a low profile.

  But something was going on at the Aryan Nations. Federal authorities were aware of the dissatisfaction with Butler’s leadership and knew the legal pressure had driven committed warriors away from the Aryan Nations. In fact, the ATF was becoming more interested in some people just over the border in Montana. Specifically, the bureau wanted to investigate a constitutionalist named David Trochmann and a Ku Klux Klan member named Chuck Howarth, who had settled in Montana in 1987 after getting out of prison on an explosives violation. Richard Butler’s top two lieutenants eventually would leave him to join Howarth, at a church they promised wouldn’t have the swastikas that covered Butler’s compound. “Adolf Hitler is dead and the Third Reich is gone; it’s history,” Howarth said. “All you’ve got now is seventy- and eighty-year-old men sitting around talking about history. It has nothing to do with the movement and problems we face today.”

  The Montana leaders knew the movement was destined for bigger and more widely accepted things. Later, the Trochmann family formed the Militia of Montana, the prototype for militia movements around the country.

  In 1989, authorities were investigating tips that Trochmann and Howarth might be gunrunning, a violation with which they were never charged. But at that time, it was up to Fadeley to figure out exactly what they might be up to. Randy Weaver had talked about knowing those guys, Fadeley told Byerly, and maybe he might lead the informant to Montana.

  On October 11, Randy and Kenneth Fadeley met again at Connies, around 9:00 a.m. After taping the first meeting with Weaver, Fadeley hadn’t worn a wire since. Again, he wasn’t wired, but he made careful notes of the meeting.

  They made small talk, had a cup of coffee. Randy asked if Fadeley had been busy.

  “Very much so,” Fadeley said. He’d sold all of his “product”—his guns. “How are you surviving?”

  “Just that, Gus.” Then Randy said times were tough and that they were moving back up to the mountain because they couldn’t afford rent anymore and that the world was sliding again. In the Soviet Union, for instance, Gorbachev was having trouble, and it looked like the hard-liners might dump him any day, sparking a war with the United States. “It’s all goin’ down the tubes,” Randy said. Fadeley had met with Randy only a few times, but almost every time he heard that the world was goin’ down the tubes.

  Fadeley brought up the Montana trip. Maybe at the end of the week, he and Randy could take a little drive over, check in with Mr. Howarth.

  Randy said that was fine.

  They talked some more about guns, which ones were in highest demand among the arms dealer’s mysterious clients. Fadeley said the biggest sellers were .223s, .308s, and shotguns, especially the shotguns. Twelve-gauge mostly.

  Then, according to Fadeley, Randy said he was ready to do business with the gun dealer. He said that he could get his hands on Remington model 870 shotguns—the standard duck hunter’s gun—and that he could saw the barrels off five shotguns a week if there was a market. Randy claimed it was Fadeley who asked him to do business.

  They walked out of Connies and stepped behind the restaurant. Randy got into his truck and pulled a gun case from behind the seat. He opened it, pulled out the kind of shotgun they’d been talking about, and pointed to a spot on the barrel.

  According to Fadeley, Randy said, “I can cut it off to about here.”

  The government informant pointed to the gun and said, “About here.” Or, “About here?” Fadeley insisted later at trial that it was a question.

  Weaver said it was an instruction.

  Either way, they were set. They made a plan to meet on Thursday, exchange the guns and the money, and drive to Montana to meet Randy’s friends. Randy seemed relieved. “I need to make some money, Gus. Hey, if this works out, maybe I can keep feeding my kids.”

  “It’s a struggle, ain’t it?”

  Back in the office, Fadeley made his report to Byerly, and they talked about using Randy to get to the new leaders in Montana. As soon as Randy got them to Howarth and Trochmann, Fadeley said, they would be done with him. He was a nobody, certainly not a leader in the movement or a target for law enforcement. But any big criminal investigation is made up of dozens of sm
aller ones—tiny bits of seemingly unrelated information, intelligence from everywhere, guys rolling over on their buddies—until the whole case suddenly comes together. Randy Weaver had a role in this investigation, getting them to Montana. In 1989, as they prepared the Montana plan, the ATF didn’t even have an active file on Randy Weaver. So that day Byerly typed his name into the computer to see if he had a criminal record or a file elsewhere at ATF. Nothing came up.

  TWO DAYS LATER, on October 13, in the ATF office in Spokane, Herb Byerly tapped out the phone number of Randy Weaver’s house and then handed the telephone to Kenneth Fadeley. A woman answered.

  “Hey, Vicki, this is Gus. How you doing?”

  They talked a little, and then Randy got on the phone. Fadeley said he couldn’t go to Montana like they’d planned because his mother had suffered a stroke. He looked up at Byerly, who’d told him to come up with some excuse because they couldn’t get air support to cover the dangerous trip to Montana that day. They put it off until they could get a plane, and Fadeley had to make up the excuse about his mother. In truth, she had been dead for three years.

  “I have to catch a flight down to see her,” Fadeley told Randy. “She’s in real bad shape.” Now they talked about “chain saws”—the code word for guns that Fadeley had picked up at the Aryan Nations the summer before. When they wanted to talk about gun lengths, they substituted the chain saw’s bar length. Fadeley said that if Randy could really produce such short chain saws, he had a buyer.

  They made plans to meet at Connies again on October 24. “Uh, maybe you could put something together and bring it with you,” Fadeley said.

  They repeated the drill, meeting again at Connies, and driving, this time to City Park, the same place they’d gone that icy day in January 1987, when Kumnick had pulled a gun and a stud finder on the big, affable informant. After going without a wire during the meeting when the gun deal was actually set up, Fadeley wore one for the transaction itself.

  Weaver was suspicious again, but Fadeley tried to put him at ease, saying the guys he was dealing with would never cause him problems. “I’ve been in this business far too long to get fucked over now.”

  Weaver showed him two shotguns, one pump-action, the other a single shot, both about five and a half inches shorter than the law allows. For the guns to be legal, Randy would have to apply to the government and pay a $200 registration fee. Of course, he had done neither.

  Randy said he cut the guns himself, “sitting under a shade tree with a vise and a hacksaw. When I get my workshop set up I can do a better job.”

  “That’s good quality,” Fadeley said. “Oh yeah, that’s beautiful. How ‘bout I pay you three hundred for both?”

  “I’m going to have to have three hundred on the pump,” Weaver said. The single shot would cost $150. Fadeley promised to bring him the rest of the money later. They transferred the guns and returned to Connies to talk some more. Randy said he needed the money badly because he was having such a tough time feeding his family.

  “There’s money to be had in it, you know,” Fadeley promised.

  “That’s what the good name of the game is.” As far as the guns, Randy said, “Personally, I hope they end up with a street gang.”

  “I got an idea where some go…. It’s just, number one, there’s no need to know.”

  “No,” Randy said. “I don’t want to know…. You know what my biggest problem is?” Randy asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “My biggest problem is going to be running around and picking up here and there and … going out and making buys.”

  “Well,” Fadeley said. “That’s why … I want it to be worth, worth your time. You figure four or five a week?”

  “Yeah. Or more.”

  “Pretty good,” the informant said. “That’s paying for all your running around.”

  At the end of the meeting, they talked about the Aryan Nations. “What do you hear from down south a little ways?” Fadeley asked.

  “I haven’t heard anything from them,” Randy said.

  “I’ve never felt comfortable with them,” Fadeley said.

  “I don’t like them,” Randy said. They were back to the same conversation they’d started two years before, when they sat in Randy’s Wagoneer with Frank Kumnick and agreed that “the movement” needed new leadership.

  And then the meeting ended. Randy Weaver went home to his family and Kenneth Fadeley drove off to meet Herb Byerly and give him the two sawed-off shotguns he’d just bought for the U.S. government. By the time this case was over, they would be the most costly shotguns in the world.

  EIGHT

  GAUNT AND TIRED, Randy Weaver walked up to the passenger door of Kenneth Fadeley’s red Nissan Sentra, which was parked in the usual meeting place, along the grassy strip behind Connies Motor Inn in downtown Sandpoint. It was just before 9:00 a.m. on November 30, 1989—another slate-colored winter day in the Panhandle. Fadeley and Randy were supposed to drive across the Montana state line to a little town called Noxon, where they were going to meet Chuck Howarth and the Trochmann family. This time the informant was not alone. ATF agents were everywhere, four of them parked in two cars a few blocks away in Sandpoint, one waiting to pick up the tail in Noxon, and a pilot on standby in Spokane. This was to be the major attempt at getting inside the Montana movement and the beginning of a new phase of Kenneth Fadeley’s undercover mission. It was the opportunity for ATF to get inside a group that even the FBI had failed so far to infiltrate. And once they got to Noxon and Fadeley got inside, this portion of his investigation would be over and Randy Weaver would’ve served his purpose.

  “This is a fancy car,” Randy said as he slipped into the passenger seat.

  “Well, actually, it was a hell of a good deal,” Fadeley said. “This thing got wrecked.”

  “I can’t go to Montana,” Randy blurted out almost immediately. “How come?”

  “Oh, I’m busy. I got somethin’ goin’.”

  “Can’t even run over there for a short time or nothin’?”

  Randy shook his head. “I really better not, Gus.”

  Fadeley worked him for a while, saying Randy had promised and that it would just take an hour, that he’d driven all that way. But Randy wanted to talk business. He wanted to sell more guns. He and his family had moved back up onto the mountain and Randy was broke and getting desperate. He wanted to sell four more single shots and a double-barrel. Then, maybe after the deal, Randy would have time to go to Montana. Or at least he’d think about it. Randy got out of the car and into his flatbed pickup, and Fadeley followed him to a mall at the other end of town, where they parked next to each other. Fadeley got out and they stood between the two vehicles, their breath steaming as they dickered over the price of the guns.

  “Let’s sit in the car and talk about it,” Fadeley said. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Inside the clean new Nissan, Randy went over the math again: four single shots at $150 each, that’s $600. A double-barrel at $300 and the $150 still owed on the first transaction. Randy wanted $1,050.

  Fadeley wasn’t going to give a grand to a guy they didn’t need anymore. He said he didn’t have the money and blamed it on his “contact,” the guy who was eventually getting the guns. “He only sent me a hundred dollars to give ya on that last deal,” Fadeley said.

  The informant counted out four twenty dollar bills and two tens—most of the money still owed from the last deal—and put them in Randy’s hand. Randy put the money in his billfold, slid it back in his pocket, and lit up a cigarette.

  “I’ll tell you what, Gus,” he said, drawing out the smoke. Then he started in again about family, wondering why the biker had never introduced Weaver to his wife and kids. Randy talked about this all the time,

  Fadeley realized, as if showing your family was some kind of lie detector.

  “If we could meet your family, that would make things a lot cooler, you know?”

  “We can set that up,” Fadeley lied. He was no
t about to drag his family into this, have his wife and kids pose as the family of a racist biker and gun dealer. Fadeley ran the conversation back around to Montana. “Would it hurt if we just met this guy and had a cup of coffee?”

  Randy said he wasn’t comfortable.

  “I don’t want you having any kinky feelings about me,” Fadeley said. He reminded Randy that this was a business they were involved in. “We’re both in this to make money.” Fadeley made it clear that Randy initiated the gun deal. “That’s pretty much how you’ve approached it with me, and you said, ‘Gus, I wanna go to work for you,’ that’s what I figured you wanted to do. I think I was right on that, wasn’t I?”

  “I’ll be honest with you” Randy said. “I’d like to feed the family, but it’s more than that with me.” He said that’s why he had to meet Fadeley’s family, to see if the biker was clean.

  The informant backpedaled. “Let me do this, let me get with the wife, and let’s see what we can come up with.”

  Randy took a breath. “I had a guy in Spokane tell me that you are bad.”

  Fadeley went numb. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m not gonna give you this guy’s name, but I talked to the wife about it, Gus, and let me tell you something. That’s all I care about is my family, and if I go to prison, or anything, I’m gonna be pissed off. That’s all I gotta say.” And then Randy said that Fadeley initiated the gun buy. “You approached me and offered me a deal.”