Most everyone in the world has a role model or a personal hero of some sort. Nelson Mandela had Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King had Henry David Thoreau, and Barack Obama had Saul Alinsky.
As for my role model? Well, I have quite a few, but the one that stands out the most is a highly intelligent, well-educated Jewish lawyer and liberal radio pundit, a man named Alan Berg.
Berg was a former Chicago lawyer-turned liberal talk radio host who openly challenged neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white supremacists on his radio show in Colorado. A walking poster child for the First Amendment, Berg was known for being brash and uncensored. His wittiness and crude humor was characteristic and matched by few others in his field.
But Berg's life was tragically cut short in 1984 when he fell victim to an assassin's bullets outside his home in Denver, Colorado. The murder was not random. It was carefully planned and orchestrated by a band of violent neo-Nazi terrorists led by a young, charismatic extremist hell-bent on overthrowing the US government, establishing an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest, and killing anyone and everyone who got in his way.
This is the story of the martyrdom of Alan Berg, and the tale of the violent terrorist group that took his life: The Order. It is a story of hatred, violence, and terrorism, but it is also a story of courage, fortitude, and, in the end, redemption.
The Life of Alan Berg
Alan Harrison Berg was born in Chicago, Illinois, on New Years Day, 1934. The second child of Dr. Joseph Berg and his wife, Ruth, Berg, who was raised Jewish, showed himself to be extremely intelligent in his youth. He excelled in school and was known for his witty, keen sense of humor and his penchant for debating.
After attending the University of Denver in Colorado, Berg, now 17, decided to put his love of arguing to use, and he entered law school in Illinois. At the age of 22, Berg became the youngest person at the time to pass the bar exam, and entered practice as a lawyer in Chicago.
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| Alan Berg during his early adulthood |
In 1951, Berg met a wealthy young socialite named Judith Lee Halpern, a native of Denver, and they married in 1958. Berg and Halpern settled down in Illinois soon afterwards, and Berg continued his career as a defense attorney, representing everyone from petty criminals to Chicago mobsters.
Unfortunately for Berg, the stress of his job eventually took its toll. He descended into a life of alcoholism, and began suffering from neuromuscular seizures.
At the urging of his wife, Berg decided to end his law practice and move to Denver, Colorado. There, he managed to kick his habit of drinking, and never touched another glass of alcohol again.
For the next few years, Berg shifted between careers, first becoming a shoe salesman, then opening a clothing store.
In the 1970s, Berg met Lawrence Gross, a talk-radio pundit for KGMC. Gross admired Berg's wit and talent in arguing, and, when he moved to San Diego, California, in 1976, he gave his show to Berg.
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| Berg during his early radio days |
In 1976, Berg suffered a seizure, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After having surgery to remove the tumor, Berg decided to grow his signature bangs and beard to cover the scars from the surgery.
Unfortunately, Berg's health problems and occupation strained his relationship with Judith. In 1978, Alan Berg and Judith Halpern divorced, but still remained close friends. In a way, Berg felt liberated by the divorce. With no family to worry about, he was free to be as brash and uncensored as possible on the radio.
KOA
Leaving KGMC in 1979 when the radio changed their format to music, Berg briefly got a job at a Denver television station, where he hosted "The Alan Berg Show" from 1980-1982, interviewing people such as famous salesman Tom Martino.
Berg left television after he got a job from the Denver-based KOA radio station in 1982. He was soon given his own talk-radio show, and, as always, he relished in debating.
Berg became known for his signature style of brash, confrontational rhetoric. He liked to argue with people who called into his radio show, and challenged neo-Nazis and anti-Semites to debate him.
Vile calls would pour in, with hateful listeners spewing baseless conspiracy theories about a Jewish takeover of America. They'd scream about how the white race was being eradicated by miscegenation, and how the "Zionist Occupation Government" was trying to destroy America's Christian heritage. The callers would call Berg a child of Satan and warn him that he was destined for Hell.
But Berg simply laughed at them. "You're a jerk.", he'd say. "That, my friend, is straight out of the Loony Tunes." The caller would engage in a heated shouting match with Berg, but he'd become only more frustrated, often to the point that he'd begin sputtering. At that point, Berg would berate the caller. "If you can't even speak English, don't call me!", Berg would laugh before abruptly hanging up.
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| Berg argues with a caller during his KHOW radio show |
Berg's audience loved it. Even though Alan Berg could be an exhausting person to argue with, he was beloved by his listeners for his wit, his intelligence, and his keen sense of humor. Berg even deemed himself "The Man you Love to Hate".
Berg undoubtedly had his share of enemies, and he had many close calls with people he'd angered. In 1981, a woman filed a lawsuit against him after her husband became so angry arguing with Berg that he suffered a heart attack. In 1983, Berg was sued again by a newspaper publisher he had insulted over the radio; the charges were ultimately dismissed.
At one point, in 1983, Berg had mercilessly berated and insulted Denver Klansman Fred Wilkins on his radio show. Wilkins was so upset that he entered KOA's studio, brandished a gun, and yelled to Berg, who was still on the air: "I'm Fred Wilkins! You're going to die!"
In typical fashion, Berg simply laughed at Wilkins. "Ah, go ahead and shoot, you coward! You don't have the guts!" he sneered to Wilkins, who barged out of the station without firing a shot. Berg and Wilkins letter settled their dispute in a private fashion, and no charges were filed.
Berg's confrontational rhetoric garnered him national publicity. In early 1984, he was interviewed by Morley Safer on the nationally-syndicated CBS program 60 Minutes, which was doing a segment on talk radio hosts.
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| Alan Berg talks with Morley Safer during an interview for the CBS program "60 Minutes" |
During the interview, Berg and Safer discussed the dangers of being a "shock jock". Berg acknowledged that his profession put his life in jeopardy but that he loved his job nonetheless.
"Isn't there a danger in your kind of profession?", asked Safer during the interview.
"Well, hopefully my legal training will prevent me from saying the one thing that will kill me!", Berg laughed. "And I've come awfully close!"
Unfortunately for Berg, it didn't.
Aryan Nations and Christian Identity
What happened next actually took root several years earlier.
Hundreds of miles away in northern Idaho, at the same time Berg's popularity reached its height, a sinister movement was beginning to take shape, one that would eventually cost Berg his life.
In the small city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, just off of a winding dirt road, there lurked a military-style compound, embroidered in swastikas, confederate flags, and other symbols of hate.
This compound housed the headquarters of the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi white supremacist militia led by a former aircraft engineer named Richard G. Butler.
Butler's charismatic, grandfather-like figure disguised the twisted hatred that lurked within him. He served as the "Reverend" of the "Church of Jesus Christ-Christian", the religious branch of the Aryan Nations, and preached a bizarre, racist theology called Christian Identity.
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| Richard Butler, the "Reverend" of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, preached a racist brand of Christianity known as Christian Identity |
Christian Identity has, for over a century, served as the primary religious doctrine of the modern white supremacist movement. Born out of racist offshoots from Southern Baptism, British Israelism, and other Christian Protestant movements, Identity theology teaches that whites are the true "chosen people" of God. Blacks and other nonwhites are "mud people", inferior "beasts of the field" created by God during His experiments.
But the primary ideology behind Christian Identity is anti-Semitism. Identity adherents believe that the Jews are not God's chosen people, but, in fact, are imposters. Christian Identity teaches that, while Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, Satan not only seduced Eve but also mated with her, and Cain, her son, was the illegitimate product of that relationship.
Cain, Identity teaches, was the father of the Jews, who carry Satan's bloodline. All Jews, Identity teaches, are evil and serve not God but Satan, with non-white "mud people" acting as their lowly henchmen. The Jews' primary goal, according to Identity theology, is to destroy God's true chosen people through "race-mixing" and genocide of the white race.
According to many Identity adherents, Adolf Hitler was a prophet of God Himself, and Nazi Germany was an example of God's Kingdom on Earth. Identity adherents strive to establish a racist, all-white homeland in America, which they call the "New Jerusalem", and annihilate all Jews and minorities.
Christian Identity's racist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic tenants resonated with hate groups all over the United States, and it has been adopted by hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and Posse Comitatus. Identity preachers spread their hatred, their bigotry, their intolerance, and their calls for violence through church ministries, sermons, radio shows, books, tracts, pamphlets, and internet sites. Recent estimates show that as many as 60,000 people in the United States are active followers of Christian Identity, especially in the Upper Northwest states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Washington.
Robert Mathews
Preaching its message of racial hatred through Christian Identity, the Aryan Nations gained thousands of followers throughout the 1980s. Many flocked to Butler's group and became indoctrinated with racism, conspiracy theories, and the desire for violent revolution.
One of those followers was a charismatic young man named Robert Jay Mathews. Born in rural Marfa, Texas, on January 16th, 1953, Mathews had always been heavily involved in radical right-wing politics. At the age of 11, he joined the John Birch Society and became an anti-communist activist. After high school, Mathews formed the "Sons of Liberty", an anti-government militia consisting mainly of Mormon survivalists who openly opposed government taxation.
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| Robert Mathews |
Mathews' group stagnated after he was arrested in 1973 for tax fraud and put on probation. Seeking a new place to settle down, Mathews moved to Metaline Falls in Washington State, where he and his father purchased a 60-acre ranch.
In 1976, Mathews married a woman named Debbie McGarity, and in 1981 she adopted Mathews' infant son, Clint, who had been the result of an affair with another woman. Despite being married, Mathews was a notorious philanderer, and, soon after moving to Washington, Mathews began another extramarital affair with a young woman named Zillah Craig.
Within months of moving to Washington, Mathews joined the Aryan Nations and became a full-fledged racist. By early 1982, he had become a chief recruiter for the Aryan Nations, and had adopted their dream of establishing a "White American Bastion" in the Pacific Northwest.
Mathews' journey into the neo-Nazi movement was amplified in 1983 following the rampage of Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus activist who killed two US Marshals and a deputy sheriff before being killed in a shootout following a four-month-long manhunt.
Kahl's death ignited a massive resurgence among the American neo-Nazi movement, and thousands of people, including Mathews, became radicalized into the ideologies of hate and violence.
Soon after Kahl's death, Mathews attended an Aryan Nations rally gathered in Kahl's honor. When anti-racist protesters interrupted the gathering, Mathews exploded.
"Why don't you Jews get the heck out of here!?", he screamed to them. "I didn't come all the way down here to hear you!" Pointing at a protester, he continued yelling. "Go over there!", he screamed. "Go across the barricade and let us be!"
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| Robert Mathews (right) yells at an anti-racist protester during an Aryan Nations rally in 1983 |
In the fall of 1983, Mathews gave a speech at the Aryan Nations' annual Aryan World Congress, in which he decried the hardships of the "American farmer" at the hands of the "lying, thieving Jew".
"Let us stand up like men", he declared, "and drive the enemy into the sea!"
Mathews' frightening journey into the American neo-Nazi movement had begun. Within years, he would become the FBI's most wanted domestic terrorist.
The Turner Diaries and The Order
By 1983, Mathews had grown disillusioned with the Aryan Nations. While he retained their hateful ideology, he felt that they were unwilling to act on it. To Mathews, the Aryan Nations was too much talk and not enough action.
Mathews soon began to preach the idea of launching a violent revolution against the "Zionist Occupation Government" (ZOG) and installing his all-white ethnostate.
As Mathews began to formulate his plans for a white revolution, he came across a book that would later serve as his blueprint: The Turner Diaries.
Published in 1978, The Turner Diaries is a novel written by notorious white supremacist William Luther Pierce, the founder of the notorious neo-Nazi National Alliance.
It has since served as one of the most popular reading materials among white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The book chronicles the tale of a fictional all-white revolution against a Jewish-controlled American government which confiscates guns, forces whites and blacks to intermarry, and rounds up patriotic white Americans and ships them to death camps.
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| The Turner Diaries is a racist novel that chronicles a fictional neo-Nazi revolution against a Jewish-controlled world government. The book would serve as the blueprint for Robert Mathews' revolution of hate. |
The star of the novel is Earl Turner, a racist revolutionary who leads a white supremacist rebel group called "The Organization" that eventually launches an all-out war against the Jewish-controlled government, known as "The System". The war begins with the truck bombing of a federal building by members of "the Order", an elite paramilitary branch of The Organization, and culminates with the "Day of the Rope", where liberals, "race traitors", Jews, minorities, and anti-racists are lynched by the thousands in the streets of Washington DC.
The global war ends when atomic bombs destroy New York City and Israel, and out of the ashes rises a "New Order", a pure, all-white paradise where Adolf Hitler is elevated to sainthood and revered as "The Great One".
The message of violent revolution preached by The Turner Diaries heavily resonated with Robert Mathews, who decided to model his racist rebel group off of The Organization. Mathews considered the book to be his bible, and memorized every single word of it. He called his group the "Bruder Schweigen", German for "Silent Brotherhood", but it soon became known by Mathews as "The Order" - the same name of the elite death squad in The Turner Diaries.
Oath of Hate: The Birth of The Order
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| The symbol of The Order |
On the night of September 22nd, 1983, Matthews and eight of his cohorts gathered in a darkened shed within the barracks of the Aryan Nations compound. They stood in a circle and placed Kenneth Loff's baby in the middle. At Mathews' instruction, each man raised his right hand and recited the following oath:
"I, as a free Aryan man, hereby swear an unrelenting oath on the green graves of our sires, upon the children in the wombs of our wives, upon the throne of God Almighty, sacred is His name, to join together in holy union with those brothers in this circle and to declare forthright that, from this moment on, I have no fear of death, no fear of foe; that I have a sacred duty to do whatever is necessary to deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race."
"I, as an Aryan warrior, swear myself to complete secrecy to The Order and total loyalty to my comrades.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should one of you fall in battle, I will see to the welfare and well-being of your family.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should one of you be taken prisoner, I will do whatever is necessary to regain your freedom.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should an enemy agent hurt you, I will chase him to the ends of the earth and remove his head from his body.
And furthermore, let me bear witness to you, my brothers that if I break this oath, let me be forever cursed upon the lips of our people as a coward and an oath-breaker.
"My brothers, let us be His battleaxe and weapons of war. Let us go forth by ones and by twos, by scores and by legions, and as true Aryan men with pure hearts and strong mind face the enemies of our faith and our race with courage and determination.
We hereby invoke the blood covenant and declare that we are in a full state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood and His will, becomes the land of our children to be".
We hereby invoke the blood covenant and declare that we are in a full state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood and His will, becomes the land of our children to be".
Thus was born The Order. Within a year, they would become the most dangerous terrorist group operating in the United States.
Hitting the Adult Store
Soon after The Order was founded, Mathews set into motion his plans to finance a substantial war chest for his revolution. To do this, The Order would finance their revolution with robberies.
The first target The Order would rob would be the World Wide Video Store, a small pornographic film store in Spokane. Not only was it a substantial source of cash, but Mathews despised seeing the interracial casting in pornographic videos, and wanted to send a message with his robbery.
On the night of October 28th, 1983, Robert Mathews gathered three fellow Order members: Bruce Pierce, Daniel Bauer, and Randy Duey, to launch the robbery. Three of the men donned masks, darkened their faces, and armed themselves with pistols and knives before entering the video store at 4612 East Sprague Avenue. Daniel Bauer remained behind in the getaway car.
The men entered the store at about 7:30 PM. Even though it was Spokane's only XXX-rated shop, the World Wide Video Store was mostly empty.
Mathews, wearing a glued-on mustache, wandered over to a display case and waited for the last customers to leave the store. Once they did, Mathews walked behind the cashier's counter and pulled out his handgun.
"We're going to be robbing the store, so take it easy.", Mathews told the startled female clerk, imitating a Mexican accent.
The store's manager, Ken Taylor, overheard the comment and realized what was happening. "Hey!", he yelled to Mathews. "Don't hurt her!". As Taylor started towards the counter, Duey blocked him and punched the manager in the face.
"That was a stupid move", Mathews told Duey. "Just leave him alone. He's not doing anything."
Mathews opened up the cash register and began grabbing handfuls of bills and coins and stuffing them into a plastic bag he carried. Once he was done, Mathews ordered his fellow robbers to tie up Taylor and the female clerk. The three men then raced out of the store, climbed into the getaway car, and sped out of the lot onto the freeway.
The robbery had been successful, but the gang didn't net nearly as much money as they were hoping for. As the four men drove back to Mathews' home, Mathews counted the stolen cash. It amounted to only $369.10, not nearly enough to finance a revolution. To make matters worse, Daniel Bauer soon began to express remorse for the crime, and became distraught at what he had taken part in.
But Robert Mathews was completely unfazed, showing absolutely no remorse for his actions. Even though this robbery had not produced much cash, it served to embolden his audacity. Furthermore, his disguise had successfully fooled the two employees. When Mathews checked the newspaper, he found that the robbers had been described as "Mexican". Upon hearing this, Mathews' comrades gave him the nickname "Carlos" as a joke.
Counterfeiting
Before long, Mathews decided that he would need more than bank robberies to finance his group. As before, he turned to The Turner Diaries as a guide.
In The Turner Diaries, The Organization embarks on a mass counterfeiting operation, manufacturing their own money and using it to fund their revolution while at the same time causing the US economy to collapse into ruin.
Using printing presses kept at the Aryan Nations compound, Mathews managed to print sheets of fake $10, $50 and $100-dollar bills for the group to use. However, far from the professional mass counterfeiting described in The Turner Diaries, Mathews only managed to produce a few thousand dollars worth of fake bills, most of them very poor-quality and easy to spot.
Nevertheless, Mathews distributed several fake bills to Order member Bruce Pierce, and ordered him to test them at a nearby department store.
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| The Order used this printing press at the Aryan Nations compound to produce thousands of dollars worth in counterfeit bills. |
Of course, the money was almost instantly spotted as a fake by a clerk, who chased Pierce into a bathroom and called the police. Pierce tried to flush his remaining fake bills down the toilet, but he couldn't hide the evidence fast enough. Police arrested Pierce and booked him on larceny charges. He was ordered to be held pending bail.
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| These fake $20 bills were manufactured by The Order |
But Mathews was not about to give up. He decided that he would bail Pierce out of prison, and, to get that money, he decided to commit his first bank robbery.
Hitting the City Bank
One day in December, 1983, Mathews entered the City Bank, just outside Seattle, wearing a jacket and armed with a handgun. "You're being robbed.", he calmly informed the young teller at the bank's desk. Handing the teller a paper bag, he told her "Put the money in the bag."
The young woman complied, and filled up the bag with money, but also slipped a dye pack in with the cash. If taken out of the bank, the dye pack would explode, staining the money (and the robber) with bright red, scorching-hot liquid and making it unusable.
Mathews forced the teller and two other women into the bathroom. "Sorry about this, but I need the money for a sick child", Mathews lied. He then left the bank and walked to the getaway car.
As Mathews got in the car, the dye pack exploded, spraying a cloud of red mist into the air. Though momentarily confused, Mathews nevertheless managed to effect his escape before police could arrive, taking $25,952 in cash with him.
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| Robert Mathews poses for a picture holding the Halloween bag filled with the money he robbed from Seattle's City Bank |
Arriving back at Zillah Craig's house, Mathews was ecstatic. "Yahweh was with me!", he beamed. "I could feel Him!". Although much of the stolen money had been stained with red ink from the dye pack, Mathews managed to clean most of the bills using paint thinner.
Mathews used some of the stolen money to pay Bruce Pierce's $2500 bail. Pierce was released from prison pending trial, and he rejoined his comrades in The Order to continue their violent revolution.
Tom Martinez
After the successful bank robbery, Robert Mathews decided that he needed to gather all of his comrades in the same location. Many members of The Order lived in several different states, making communication difficult. All members of The Order, said Mathews, needed to gather in Washington State, the intended homeland of his "White American Bastion".
On January 1st, 1984, Robert Mathews flew to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to convince his best friend and fellow Order member, Tom Martinez, to come to Washington State and join the rest of the group.
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| One of the few known photos of Tom Martinez |
Thomas Allen Martinez had lived a tough life. Born in Kensington, a poor working-class area of Philadelphia, in 1955, Martinez had grown up in an urban environment plagued by gang violence and racial tensions. Fights between white, black, and Latino gangs were everyday occurrences in Philadelphia, and Martinez, being a white man in a non-white-majority area, frequently became the target of harassment. His best friend in high school was killed by a black youth, and Martinez himself dropped out in 11th grade after he felt too threatened to continue attending high school.
Martinez tried to get a job after dropping out, but his lack of education, coupled with new affirmative action laws, made getting a job very difficult. After a short, failed stint in the military, Martinez only managed to land a minimum-wage job as a janitor, making barely enough to sustain himself, his wife, and their infant daughter.
At the time, Martinez blamed blacks and racial integration for his situation. So, in 1976, at the age of 21, Martinez joined a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1980, he joined the National Alliance, the same group that had published The Turner Diaries, and began selling neo-Nazi literature.
Like Robert Mathews, Tom Martinez soon became a full-fledged racist. He called black people he saw "niggers" and openly decried Jews as the "enemy of the white race". Hate was his way of life.
In fact, it was at a meeting of the National Alliance in 1981 that Martinez first met Robert Mathews. The two quickly became best friends. Martinez saw Mathews as the brother he never had, and he considered Mathews the source of salvation for his struggling family.
So Martinez was elated to see Mathews again when he arrived in Philadelphia. Mathews bragged to his friend about The Order's exploits and robberies, and showed off the money he and his group had counterfeited. He gave a large portion of the fake cash to Martinez and told him to pass it around.
Martinez suddenly had qualms about what he was getting himself into. He had never committed a serious crime before. Robbery and counterfeiting were big steps for him. As much as he believed in his racist cause, Martinez was not ready to participate in an anti-government rebellion.
But the hardships of the struggles Martinez faced ultimately outweighed what little restraint he possessed. Giving in to his desperation, Martinez decided to join Mathews' group. He was now a full-fledged member of The Order, dedicated to the cause of violent revolution in the name of racial hatred.
Robbin' the Hood
While Mathews was away in Philadelphia with Martinez, the other members of The Order continued to finance their cause through illicit means. Throughout early January, 1984, Bruce Pierce and fellow Order member Gary Yarbrough embarked on a series of burglaries in the Spokane area, robbing homes, Radio Shacks, and parked cars, stealing over $10,000 worth of equipment.
On January 23, 1984, the pair also robbed a Schooney's restaurant just ten miles north of the Aryan Nations compound.
As a store courier was carrying a bag containing $8,000 in cash revenue, Piece attacked him, grabbed the bag, and scampered away into the surrounding woods, with the angry courier in hot pursuit. As the man chased Pierce, Yarbrough emerged, brandishing a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle, and fired several .223-caliber rounds at the courier, sending him running for his life.
Although Pierce and Yarbrough made a clean getaway, they soon decided that the risk was not worth the small amounts of money they netted from restaurant robberies. Banks and armored cars, they reasoned, were a better source of revenue.
So, on January 30, 1984, just a week after the Schooney's robbery, Pierce and Yarbrough decided to hit the Washington Mutual Savings Bank in Spokane. That afternoon, the pair left a brown parcel at a Two Swabbies clothing store near the bank. Pierce then called the police, telling them that a bomb was at the store, in an attempt to distract them from the planned robbery.
Shortly after 4:00 PM, Pierce entered the Mutual Savings Bank at 11205 East Sprague Avenue (ironically, just blocks away from the video store the group had previously robbed), and walked up to the bank's teller counter.
Pierce handed the teller a plastic bag and a gave her a note reading "Put the money in the bag and we won't hurt you". Confused, she looked up at Pierce, who quietly snarled "I mean it! Give me all your money!"
The teller complied and stuffed the money from the teller drawers into the plastic bag, handing it back to Pierce. "Look at the ground", the robber said as he backed away. Running out of the bank doors, Pierce got into the getaway car, where Yarbrough sat waiting, and sped off.
The robbery netted even less cash than the previous heist: only $3600. The group later sent $200 of the stolen money to Pastor Robert Miles of the Mountain Church, a Christian Identity ministry in Michigan, and gave another $100 as a donation to the Aryan Nations.
Armored Cars
When Robert Mathews returned from Philadelphia with Tom Martinez, he was overjoyed to hear of his group's exploits. Even though Pierce and Yarbrough had netted little money from their bank robbery, Mathews was still determined to carry out more heists.
In March of 1984, Mathews decided that his gang should begin targeting armored trucks. Doing so, however, would be dangerous business. Courier guards were always armed with pistols and shotguns, and the trucks themselves were heavily fortified and built to withstand gunfire. In some cases, guards would even use their massive trucks as weapons against getaway vehicles.
But Mathews was not deterred by the risks involved in his plan. Mathews had cased numerous businesses around the Seattle, Washington, area, and he noticed that an armored car always made a large cash pickup from the Fred Meyer department store every week.
Mathews, Pierce, Yarbrough, and fellow Order member Randy Duey obtained a small, ramshackle Dodge Dart to use as their getaway car. The car was in bad condition. It had no reverse gear and the trunk had a tendency to pop open, but Mathews was determined to follow through with the robbery anyway.
On March 16th, 1984, the group made their move. After phoning in a bomb threat to a nearby Safeway, Mathews and his gang pulled their Dodge Dart into the parking lot of the Fred Meyer department store. A car from the Continental Armored Transport company was already parked outside the main entrance. One guard sat in the truck, while the other guard, George King, entered the store to pick up the cash.
Mathews, Duey, and Pierce entered the store and followed King to the cash pickup, while Yarbrough waited in the getaway car. When King walked from the back office carrying several large bags of cash, Pierce and Mathews made their move.
In a food aisle of the department store, Mathews stepped in front of King, blocking his path. "Pardon me, sir", said King as he tried to pass.
Pierce then emerged from behind, grabbed King's arm, and twisted it behind his back.
"Get face down on the floor and we won't hurt you!", whispered Mathews. He held the guard down as Pierce grabbed King's gun and cash bags. "Don't move", Mathews warned King. "There's another man in the store with a gun".
Pierce and Mathews then rejoined Duey and the trio sprinted back to the getaway car, throwing the cash bags into the trunk. The group abandoned the Dodge Dart a few hundred yards away from the department store, got into Mathews' car, and drove away, unspotted, into the Seattle traffic.
This time, The Order scored big, netting $43,345 in cash. Each of the robbers kept $7000 of the money for themselves, while the rest went to financing the group's revolution. Checking the newspapers the next day, the group was further emboldened when they read that George King had described his assailants as Latino. As before, their disguises had worked.
The successful robbery also served to once again unite the other members of The Order, who had briefly separated following Pierce's arrest for counterfeiting.
Once again, Mathews had crossed another line in his violent rebellion against the government he hated. In his mind, there was now no turning back.
The Northgate Robbery
Emboldened by their successful hit on the Fred Meyer store, The Order decided to rob another armored car, again in Seattle.
This time, Mathews said, they would up the ante. They would target Seattle's Northgate Mall and, instead of robbing a courier, they would hit the armored truck itself. This robbery, Mathews said, would net them hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
As before, Mathews planned to use a diversion to distract police from the planned robbery. He planned to target a pornographic theater in Seattle, but this time, he intended to use a real bomb, not a fake one. Mathews considered pornography to be a Jewish-created immoral scourge upon American society, and he wanted to make a powerful statement with this bombing.
To Mathews, the fact that innocent people could be hurt in his violent rebellion was of little concern. His audacity and devotion to hate consumed him, and he was willing to kill anyone who stood in his way.
At about 5:00 PM on April 22nd, 1984, Order member Gary Yarbrough walked into the Embassy Theater, a pornographic movie theater in downtown Seattle. He carried a small paper bag which held an incendiary bomb, fashioned out of an explosive charge wired to a battery and pocket watch.
Yarbrough placed the bomb in a vacant seating aisle within one of the screening theaters. About 20-30 people were inside, but Yarbrough was not deterred by the implications of his actions. He switched on the bomb's timer and strolled out of the theater.
At 5:05 PM, a deafening, fiery explosion blasted through the Embassy Theater, ripping through seats and filling the building with thick black smoke. Terrified patrons fled through emergency exits and the theater was evacuated in minutes.
The damage from the bomb was minimal; only about tens seats were destroyed and there were no casualties. But, yet again, Mathews had crossed another boundary. He had graduated from robberies to bombings.
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| Emergency personnel arrive at the Embassy Theater following the bomb explosion |
The following day, on April 23rd, while police and ATF investigators combed over the bombed out theater, Mathews set his plan into motion. Accompanied by Order members Bruce Pierce, Gary Yarbrough, Randy Duey, Denver Parmenter, Andrew Barnhill, and Richard Kemp, Mathews drove along the Seattle freeway towards the Northgate Mall. As the group drove through downtown Seattle, Kemp threw boxes of nails out the window, attempting to puncture the tires of other cars and cause a traffic jam.
After making a call threatening another bombing at the Embassy Theater, the group pulled their getaway cars into the Northgate Mall.
At about 3:00 PM, a Continental armored truck pulled into the mall's parking lot. Incredibly, one of the guards in the truck was George King, the very same guard the group had robbed three months earlier.
While King entered the Bon Marche department store within the Northgate Mall, two Order members got out, dressed as window cleaners, and stood by the entrance, ready to ambush King once he returned.
When King emerged from the Bon Marche, wheeling a cart full of money bags, the robbers made their move. Denver Parmenter blocked the armored truck's path with his vehicle, and Bruce Pierce and Randy Duey drew their weapons and advanced on King.
Pierce pressed the barrel of his pistol against King's head as the guard opened the back doors of the armored truck. "OK, George!", he said, recognizing the guard from before. "You know the drill. Give me your gun."
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| Members of The Order robbed this Continental Armored Car outside Seattle's Northgate Mall on April 23rd, 1984 |
The truck's driver, Robert White, noticed the commotion going on behind him. "What the heck is going on back there!?", he yelled as he turned around in his seat. Spotting Pierce holding a gun to King's head, White immediately drew his service revolver and aimed it at the robber through a gun port in the truck. At the same time, Randy Duey drew his own pistol and shoved its barrel through the same gun port.
"Bobby, don't do anything!", pleaded King. He was worried that, if a shootout erupted, Pierce would kill him. As White and Duey trained their guns on each other, Mathews, Barnhill, and Parmenter emerged, aiming rifles at the guard through a side window.
Richard Kemp approached the truck from the other side, brandishing a shotgun and holding a sign reading "Get out or die!". When White didn't comply, Parmenter fired a shot into the air from his Ruger Mini-14. "Get out!", yelled Mathews. "We're not playing around!"
Outnumbered and outgunned, White dropped his revolver and surrendered. After subduing him and King, Mathews began scooping up the money bags and tossing them to his comrades. After emptying the truck, Mathews and the rest of his gang got into their getaway cars and sped out of the lot. The entire robbery took barely five minutes.
This robbery was another major success for The Order. Mathews and his gang stole over $200,000 in cash. Mathews set aside $85,000 for his group, $40,000 for the Aryan Nations, and split the rest of the money among himself and the other bandits.
Bombing the Synagogue
A week after the Northgate robbery, The Order carried out another attack.
Bruce Pierce had been building bombs for his comrades to use in their revolution, and he was eager to test them out. It was Holocaust Remembrance Week, and Bruce Pierce thought it would be an appropriate time to target the Jewish community in Idaho.
On the afternoon of April 29th, 1984, days after the Northgate robbery, Bruce Pierce and Richard Kemp drove to the Congregation-Ahavath Israel Synagogue in Boise, Idaho, carrying a bomb made out of three sticks of dynamite, a blasting cap, a battery, and a kitchen timer.
Prying off a metal cover at the back of the building, Pierce scooted through a crawl space under the synagogue and placed the bomb underneath the kitchen. Setting the timer for 30 minutes, Pierce crawled out from under the building and got into Kemp's car.
At 4:30, the bomb exploded with a loud bang, buckling the floor and starting a small fire in the synagogue's kitchen. The flames were quickly extinguished and no one was hurt, but the bombing caused more than $4000 in damages to the synagogue.
When Mathews heard of the bombing, he became enraged. Pierce had taken too much of a risk, he said, for an action that netted no money. Furthermore, Mathews complained, Pierce didn't use a big enough bomb. If Pierce was to carry out such attacks, Mathews said, he expected a body count.
In fact, while Pierce had hoped the bombing would serve to terrorize the synagogue's worshipers, the effect was the exact opposite. Following the attack, the entire city of Boise came together to support the local Jewish community. Donations poured in to pay for the damages caused in the bombing, and the city became united together against hatred.
Up to this point, Mathews had shed no blood in his revolution, but, soon, even that would change. In May, 1984, The Order would escalate their crimes from bombing to murder.
Ironically, the group's first victim would be one of their own members.
The Murder of Walter West
In May of 1984, Robert Mathews began to become paranoid that a government spy had infiltrated his organization. He began to hunt for this suspected informant that he was convinced was selling his group out.
Soon, Mathews' suspicions turned to Walter Edward West, an Aryan Nations member who had been one of the founding members of The Order. West, 42, was the father of a nine-year-old son and a longtime racist. He had been a devoted follower of Mathews but had refused to take part in the group's crimes beyond money laundering, which made Mathews suspect he was an informant.
Mathews' suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Order members Richard Kemp and Jimmy Dye complained that West would often get drunk at local bars and boast about The Order's accomplishments.
"He's running his mouth about us", Kemp told Mathews, "and he's showing off the counterfeit money."
"Then that leaves us no room.", responded Mathews. "We have to kill him."
"I'll do it", volunteered Kemp. "Alright", responded Mathews. "Take Jimmy and Randy with you."
Later, Kemp, Duey, and Dye met up with fellow Order members David Tate and David Lane and explained that they were going to kill Walter West. Tate and Lane agreed to the plan without hesitation. They were perfectly willing to kill anyone who posed a threat to The Order.
On May 23rd, 1984, David Tate and Jimmy Dye went into the dense woods along the Washington-Oregon border, where they dug a makeshift grave into the forest floor. In the meantime, Randy Duey and Richard Kemp went to fetch Walter West, luring him with the false pretense that his estranged wife wanted to reconcile with him. West was confused. He hadn't expected his wife to meet him in the woods, but his friends promised him that she would be there.
At about 6PM, Duey and Kemp marched the unsuspecting Walter West into the dense woods. West was armed with his Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which he always carried with him. As the trio marched into the woods, Kemp began to reconsider his actions. Walter West was his best friend, and now he was tasked with killing him. He thought about aborting the whole plan, but, in the end, his fanatical devotion to Mathews overcame his doubts.
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| The Order's first victim was one of their own members: Walter West |
When the trio reached the grave pit, Kemp brandished a sledgehammer and bashed Walter West on the back of the head as hard as he could, knocking the man unconscious. Kemp then struck West again as he fell, spraying blood into the air.
"Good job, Rich!", said Duey as he examined West's prone body. "You did it!" Kemp simply stood in muted horror, staring at his fallen friend.
Suddenly, Walter West sprang up from the ground, shrieking in terror and wildly waving his hands. "What's going on here, Randy!?", he yelled, walking on his knees towards his friend. "What are you guys doing?!"
"Kill him, Richard!", Duey yelled to Kemp, but Kemp was frozen in shock, unable to move.
Duey immediately grabbed West's Ruger Mini-14 rifle, aimed it at West, and fired a single .223-caliber round into his forehead. The shot tore through West's brain and exited the back of his skull, killing him instantly.
The four men dragged West's corpse into the makeshift grave they'd dug and then filled it in with dirt. With the job done, they went back to their vehicles and returned to the Aryan Nations compound.
The body of Walter West was never found. To this day, he is still listed as a missing person by the state of Idaho.
Following the murder of Walter West, Tom Martinez became fearful of crossing Mathews. If the terrorist leader was willing to kill members of his own group, nobody was safe. And, while Martinez didn't know it yet at the time, Mathews had already decided who the group would kill next.
The next time Martinez met Mathews, the leader gave him a cautious warning. "Keep your eyes and ears open", Mathews told Martinez. "A guy in Colorado is going to be taken care of."
"Who?", asked Martinez, perplexed.
"You don't need to know that buddy", Mathews replied with a smile. "Just keep your eyes and ears open. This guy just has to go."
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(End of Part 1 -> Click here for Part 2)
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