Ava Thompson once said: "Heroes are not meant to be perfect; they are meant to be human".
Thomas Allen Martinez was the embodiment of that phrase. He was far from a perfect person. He was far from a flawless person. But he was one of my greatest heroes.
Born in 1955 in the poor Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, Tom Martinez grew up surrounded by poverty and gang violence. He dropped out of high school after his best friend was killed by a black gang member, which served, in part, to create a festering hatred of minorities that would corrupt Martinez into the hateful bigot he became in the early part of his adulthood.
Martinez married young, and after a failed stint in the US military he found work as a janitor, making just barely enough to sustain himself, his wife, and their child. Angry at the world, and desperate to find a scapegoat to blame for his problems, Martinez drifted into the burgeoning far-right movement. He joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1976, and in 1980 he joined the National Alliance, which at the time was one of the most infamous and influential neo-Nazi organizations in the United States.
Through the National Alliance, Martinez met another young white supremacist named Robert Jay Mathews, who would quickly become Martinez's closest friend. Martinez, an only child, would later describe Mathews as the "brother [he] never had", and became one of his most devoted followers.
Robert Mathews had a history of his own. In 1983, Mathews and a collection of multiple other white supremacists founded a secretive terrorist organization called "The Order", which quickly embarked on a series of bank robberies, bombings, and, eventually, murders. The first victim of The Order was, ironically, one of their own members, Walter West, who they wrongfully suspected of being an informant.
But on June 18th, 1984, The Order committed its most notorious crime - the assassination of liberal Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg. Berg, well known for his habit of baiting neo-Nazis to call into his show so he could mercilessly mock and berate them, had once taunted and mocked a member of The Order on the air. The group responded by killing him.
Martinez was uneasy about the group's penchant for violence. Though he was not involved in planning the murders of West or Berg, Martinez participated in laundering stolen and counterfeited currency for The Order. And Mathews confided in Martinez the group's lofty goals, plans for mass terror, mass murder, and even overthrowing the United States government. The Order plotted to poison water plants with cyanide, blow up power stations and gas lines, and assassinate more people, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, television personality and activist Norman Lear, and even President Ronald Reagan.
Eventually, Mathews recruited Martinez to participate in the group's next planned killing; the kidnapping and murder of Morris Dees, a lawyer and founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center who was notorious for suing far-right organizations and had already won numerous crushing victories against several Ku Klux Klan groups. "We'll torture him for information. We'll peel that Jew fucker's skin from his bones", Mathews told Martinez, "and then we'll kill him and bury him and pour lye over him".
But the turning point in Martinez's journey came when he was arrested in July 1984 for passing some of the group's counterfeit currency. Martinez now faced decades in prison, and for the first time he faced a reckoning with the consequences of the life he had led. The FBI knew that Martinez was unlikely to be acting alone, and suspected that the counterfeiting operation was only part of a much larger story. And so they came to Martinez with a proposition: If he would talk to the FBI and become an informant, maybe he could avoid spending the next twenty years of his life in prison.
But Martinez also knew that more than his freedom was on the line. To stay quiet would not only mean that he would go to prison, but it would also mean that The Order's terrorist activities would take more innocent lives - perhaps hundreds more.
Yet even so, Martinez knew doing the right thing would have its own devastating costs. Becoming an FBI informant would forever brand him a traitor to the white supremacist movement. He would never be able to live a normal life again. He would spend the rest of his days having to look over his shoulder, knowing that Mathews and his followers would stop at nothing to kill him.
Indeed, part of the oath that members of The Order took read: "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."
Ultimately, however, Martinez chose to follow his conscience. He took the deal and became an informant. Knowing that it would forever put him and his family in mortal danger, Martinez did the right thing.
The Order collapsed within six months. Robert Mathews was later killed in a shootout with FBI agents in Greenbank, Washington, in December of 1984. One of Mathews' last letters was to call for all loyal members and followers of The Order to hunt down Tom Martinez and "remove his head from his body".
By 1986, all of the remaining members of The Order had been rounded up and were, thanks in large part to Martinez's testimony, convicted and sentenced to decades in federal prison. Tom Martinez's actions saved the life of Morris Dees, Norman Lear, and likely hundreds, if not thousands, of other innocent people.
And yet Martinez still could not escape the consequences of following his conscience. The Aryan Brotherhood later put out a contract on Tom Martinez's life, and in 1987 an Aryan Nations member was arrested for attempting to carry it out. Tom Martinez and his family were forced to change their names, sever contact with family and friends, and spend the rest of their lives in hiding.
Yet even then, Tom Martinez still spoke out. Working with the Anti-Defamation League, Martinez routinely appeared at high schools across the country, educating young people about the dangers of extremism and radicalization. He urged teenagers to not fall down the same path he had, to not be corrupted by hatred and bigotry like he once had been. He avoided being photographed. On the rare occasions he did appear on camera, he was either in heavy disguise or in shadow. In fact, the picture of him included in this article is one of less than five that I have found to exist.
Ever since I learned about The Order some 11 years ago, when I was 14 years old, I considered Tom Martinez one of my heroes. It was he who inspired me to study and write about the dangers of hate groups and domestic extremism in America. I spent the next 11 years trying to contact Tom Martinez, to tell him how much he had meant to me, a random nerdy kid from suburban Massachusetts who he never knew. But Tom Martinez had done well to hide himself. Though I was able to contact one or two people who knew him, I was unable to ever reach Tom Martinez himself.
I never did meet Tom Martinez. And now I never will.
I learned today that Tom Martinez died back in late June of 2025. His death went unreported in nearly all mainstream news media, which is why I only learned about it now. In fact I only learned about his death from someone informing me in a YouTube comment.
In a way, that was a sad microcosm of the life Tom Martinez had been forced to adopt as a cost of doing the right thing. He died quietly and unnoticed by most of the world. And it's not lost on me that my learning of his death came amidst the backdrop of the more high profile assassination death of Charlie Kirk, a prominent right-wing activist who has now become a deified martyr for the American far-right.
But as the United States once again grapples with the frightening rise of white supremacy and bigotry - and especially as I see the depressingly predictable pattern of the GOP falling lock-step in line with the illiberal, cruel, and increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the second Trump Administration - I want to take time today to mourn the passing of a man who sacrificed everything to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming evil - despite knowing exactly what it would do to him - even as his passing goes unnoticed by most and mourned by even fewer.
If only there were more Tom Martinezes in the world.
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