Blood and Politics (27 page)

The party’s finances were equally squalid. Through the end of July, it had raised $41,749.82 and spent around $31,700. There were local Rotary Clubs with bigger budgets than this so-called national third party. The “convention” officially nominated George Hansen, contingent on his final acceptance. (Hansen was not present.) Carto prepared the body for a rejection by Hansen and passed a resolution that empowered the executive committee to choose another presidential and vice presidential nominee if Hansen ultimately turned down the party’s overtures, as he did.
²⁹

While this charade was acted out in the hotel’s forum room, the one candidate who would have accepted the Populist endorsement, David Duke, sat in the bar, making small talk with flight attendants. He was waiting his turn to address the meeting, but it never came. Duke may have been the buzz among the delegates, but Carto wasn’t quite ready to put him back on the program.
³⁰
Duke would have done better to campaign that weekend at the Stone Mountain cross burning.

Nevertheless, a string of events reinforced Duke’s conclusion that a new mass insurgency was in the offing. Throughout 1987 whites continued to mobilize after Forsyth County. Klan activity and related violence occurred in twenty-six Georgia counties, and in several of those counties cross burning and rallies occurred on multiple occasions.
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Georgia aside, the first features of this embryonic insurgency were its seemingly spontaneous development, its relative autonomy from established hardcore cadre formations, and the involvement of a new generation of
youths born in the years after desegregation became law. And it was national in scope.

Just weeks before the first Forsyth riot, young whites had chased three black men through the streets of Howard Beach in New York City. One of the three, Michael Griffith, was hit by a passing car and killed. Most noticeably, when civil rights advocates marched in protest through the Howard Beach neighborhood, they were met by more than one hundred jeering whites. That June in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood, more than a thousand curious young (white) people listened politely at a Klan rally, then turned into a violent mob of five hundred to attack a small anti-Klan picket across the street. But the young and the racist were not simply blue collar or on the streets in that period. University campuses were hit by one incident after another: racist graffiti at Smith College; assaults on Mexican-American students at a California community college; two masked white students’ attack on a black student at the University of Texas; formation of the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist at the University of Chicago; and more.
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In addition, racist squads known as skinheads began to spontaneously emerge, often with violent consequences. (They became increasingly important in the years following.) Despite the Populist Party’s poor showing that weekend, David Duke was correct: something was happening.

Not everyone agreed with Duke’s diagnosis. The
National Review
columnist Joe Sobran, for example, commenting on the Howard Beach violence, concluded that racism “has no definition” and was “liberal billingsgate.”
³³
The Reagan administration also took a dim view of claims that Forsyth County signaled a turn for the worse. A spokesman for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service told the House of Representatives that “enclaves such as Howard Beach . . . or Forsyth County” are not “a reflection of a rising tide of racism.”
³⁴
This view was reinforced by the Civil Rights Division head William Bradford Reynolds, who claimed that the Forsyth riot was merely “a small band of bystanders whose childish prattle” should have gone unnoticed.
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Future events proved Duke right. Even if the Populist Party demonstrated little ability to take immediate advantage of the new opportunities, the steam coming out of white Middle Americans would find (or create) organizational vessels for itself. During the years to come white supremacist groups were to influence a growing sphere of the populace. And the events of 1987 marked a nodal point in the development of
their movement. As the mainstreamers’ wing was poised to plump up with growth, federal prosecutors were squeezing the vanguardists. Indeed, at the very moment the Reagan administration was pooh-poohing events in Georgia, it was pursuing the most significant government action against the white supremacist movement since World War Two.

November 6, 1987.
Louis Beam lay flat on the ground in the American tourist district of Lake Chapala, Mexico, a large-caliber pistol pointed into his left ear. The groceries and his seven-year-old daughter were still in the car. While he stayed inert, Beam’s twenty-year-old wife, Sheila, scurried around indoors, looking for safety in the two-story house. A second unidentified man in a T-shirt toting a shotgun was inside, coming up the stairs after her.

“Come here,” he demanded, threatening her with his raised shotgun.

Half hidden by the wall, Sheila pulled her own heavy Beretta pistol from behind her skirt. She fired three times down the staircase, hitting the intruder each time. Then she turned to run but was grazed on the leg by a bullet. Bleeding, she dashed from one room to the next, firing shots out the upstairs windows. In response, a five-minute fusillade peppered her house.

In the heavy night air outside, car lights shone on men dashing around, setting up a siege. Watching the men, Sheila finally figured her assailants were law enforcement officers, not criminals. She surrendered to a joint task force of Mexican
federales
and American FBI agents.
¹

That was only the beginning of the ordeal. Sheila was taken to Guadalajara, where she was interrogated before being sent to the women’s prison in Puerto Agrande.
²
“On the eighth day,” Sheila swore later, “officials suddenly came to me and told me that the charges of intentionally wounding a Federal Police Officer and possession of a weapon” had been dropped. She was processed and returned to her family in Santa Fe, Texas.

Louis Ray Beam had been on the FBI’s most wanted list for six months. A poster described him as “armed and extremely dangerous.”
³

After months of searching, the FBI had finally traced him through friends in Texas to a Mexican mail drop.
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To win the cooperation of Mexican authorities, Beam claimed later, the FBI had told the federales he was a drug pusher. In any case, the arrest didn’t meet American legal standards, subsequently complicating the juridical use of evidence the agents had seized.

Years later Beam told and retold the tale of his arrest in Mexico, reveling in his fourth wife Sheila’s brave shoot-out. There were several ways he might have told the story. He could have described her as an Aryan warrioress, something like the female guerrillas who populated William Pierce’s futuristic fantasy novel
The Turner Diaries
. Those tough women equaled men in every capacity except decision making. Beam instead chose a more accessible nationalist myth, that of a brave white woman facing native savages on the frontier. “My wife did nothing that no American pioneer woman did not do for her husband when the Indians came,” he said. “[She is] a true, red-blooded American lass.”
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Her release from the Puerto Agrande jail had been “a miracle” by Yahweh, he said.

Beam himself was not released. From Chapala, he was taken in shackles to the Guadalajara airport, flown to Nuevo Laredo and then on to an Arkansas county jail.
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His days as the underground resistance’s commander in chief appeared to be over. Louis Beam had gone into hiding knowing that he would be indicted for plotting to overthrow the United States government. Now he would go to trial with other named coconspirators. With his capture the Justice Department closed the penultimate chapter of its multiyear crackdown on white supremacist bank robbers, killers, and bomb plotters. The finale would be an epic trial of multiple defendants charged with seditious conspiracy.

The attempt to squelch these violent vanguardists began just months after government officials realized the full import of the accomplishments of Robert Mathews’s Order gang, and the path to this point had passed through a number of federal and state prosecutions. It needs to be noted that the Reagan administration’s Justice Department was unprepared for the task. It had previously demonstrated little interest in federal prosecutions of attacks by white supremacists on black people and other ordinary civilians, preferring to leave such cases to state courts and county attorneys. Where these local channels were unresponsive, lawsuits pursued by nongovernmental organizations became the primary avenue for legal redress.
⁷

However, once white supremacists started killing law enforcement
officials and robbing banks in 1983 and 1984, Attorney General Meese and the FBI took a more aggressive federal posture. The FBI planted more confidential informants inside white supremacist groups, started tapping phones, and made arrests in a number of incipient criminal conspiracies. The Justice Department coordinated several prosecutions over a multiyear period, in a program dubbed Operation Clean Sweep. After the FBI broke the back of The Order and arrested James Ellison’s CSA crew, the Justice Department succeeded in securing racketeering (RICO) convictions in Seattle and Arkansas courtrooms by the end of 1985. Also that year, the FBI stopped a plot to kill a government informant, sending the Aryan Nations’ security chief off to prison. Another Aryan Nations grouplet was apprehended after bombing the rectory of a local Coeur d’Alene priest, and then bombing the Coeur d’Alene federal building and two local businesses in September 1986.

In Nevada, federal agents arrested Posse Comitatus founder William Potter Gale and his coconspirators from the Committee of the States in 1986. They were convicted of plotting to attack the Internal Revenue Service, which continued the antitax and promilitia bent of his previous Posse activity. Gale was convicted a year later and then died quietly from emphysema while awaiting an appeal. In a similar case in December 1986, the FBI arrested eight members of the Arizona Patriots on gun and conspiracy charges, including plans to rob banks to finance their activities. And in the troubled state of North Carolina, the U.S. attorney issued an arrest warrant for Glenn Miller, after the former leader of the White Patriot Party jumped bail on other charges. Miller made a half-suicidal “Declaration of War” before being captured on April 30, 1987, at a hideout near Springfield, Missouri. He then quickly decided to turn state’s evidence.

The next to the last event in the federal campaign took place in Denver, just weeks after Louis Beam’s capture in Mexico. Federal prosecutors charged four Order members with violating the civil rights of radio talker Alan Berg by murdering him. The defendants were already serving long sentences for Seattle racketeering convictions when they went to trial before Judge Richard Matsch, a law and order Republican appointed by President Richard Nixon.
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The mixed verdict did not bode well for the seditious conspiracy trial pending in Arkansas: two convicted, two acquitted.

This coordinated multistate crackdown ended in Fort Smith, a sleepy federal court district in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, just across the state line from eastern Oklahoma. After a yearlong grand jury investigation, the Justice Department announced on April 21, 1987, a sweeping
set of charges: interstate transport of stolen money, conspiracy to manufacture illegal weapons, conspiracy to murder federal officials, and seditious conspiracy—that is, conspiracy to “overthrow, put down and to destroy by force the government of the United States and form a new Aryan nation,” according to the federal documents. Ten men were indicted on charges of seditious conspiracy. Four others were named for conspiracy to murder a federal judge. (One was indicted on both sets of charges.) A total of fourteen men were accused.

In court documents, the federals asserted that a plan to overthrow the government had been agreed upon at a meeting in July 1983 and then put into action. It listed 119 overt acts, including the robberies, bombing, counterfeiting, and murders committed by The Order as “furtherance of the [seditious] conspiracy” headed by Robert Miles, Richard Butler, Louis Beam, and an unindicted coconspirator, James Ellison.
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The heart of the case was directed against Miles, Butler, and Beam. The others charged were secondary players whose alleged crimes simply lent credence to the charges against these three principals.

If the federals intended to close down the vanguardist wing of the movement with this case, several escape holes existed from the very beginning. While Robert Miles and Louis Beam played a direct role in creating a clandestine submovement, as discussed earlier, other men had had a hand in the process as well. Most significantly, William Pierce, the ideological godfather of this trend, was left untouched by any prosecution—state or federal. And Tom Metzger, who had emerged as the spokesman for the street warrior set, remained free from any charges. As the repression of those most closely associated with The Order, the CSA, and Aryan Nations continued, the large reservoir of remaining activists began moving over into other organizations.

There is evidence that the Justice Department understood this weakness in its larger effort to stifle the vanguardists. An early FBI affidavit contended: “Despite the convictions of . . . members of the racketeering enterprise known as THE ORDER [it] continues to exist and is being led by [Robert] MILES, [Richard] Butler, [Tom] Metzger, [William] Pierce, [and Glenn] Miller.”
¹⁰
Although they correctly named Glenn Miller, William Pierce, and Tom Metzger, the statement betrayed the prosecutors’ failure to understand how the underground groups operated. The pending seditious conspiracy case rested on the notion that the various violent white supremacist gangs simply continued The Order, once led by Robert Mathews.