Blood and Politics (30 page)

Lyons was just over thirty years old at the time, and his still-boyish face was incongruous with the gravity of the proceedings. Before the Fort Smith trial, Lyons was a small-time lawyer in a Houston personal
injury firm. But Beam’s stamp of approval and his role at Fort Smith enabled him to quickly enter the movement’s most inner circles.

Lyons’s exact relationship to Beam remains a mystery. He gave reporters two different stories about how he first met the Texas Klansman. In 1988 Lyons told the
Southwest Times Record
(Fort Smith) that he had met Beam in December 1985, when two men in fedoras and trench coats unexpectedly knocked on his apartment door in Houston and took him outside to meet Louis Beam in the backseat of a car. In this
Godfather-
like scene, Beam reportedly told Lyons that he expected to be arrested shortly and asked Lyons to arrange bail. Lyons told the
Record
he only recognized Beam that night from a chance meeting the two had had at a Houston gun show in 1980.
⁵

Lyons told a different story to
The News & Observer
(Raleigh) in 1992, claiming their first encounter had been in the Hofbrau Restaurant in Houston. Lyons and his buddies were drinking and singing German songs. Beam and his party began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in response.
⁶

Whatever the actual circumstances of that initial meeting, Lyons had leaped into action after Beam was arrested in Mexico. He quit his Houston job, and despite making little contribution on the courtroom floor, he sat at the defense table every day. At night he often drove across the state line to Oklahoma and slept at Robert Millar’s Elohim City encampment, beginning a long and fateful friendship there. And as we shall discover, Lyons popped up during several key events in the future.
⁷

Alongside “Generals” Beam, Butler, and Miles, a second group of defendants included those who were supposedly “soldiers” in this seditious army. These defendants were being tried a second time (and in some cases a third time) for the same Order-related crimes on which they had already been convicted in the racketeering trial. Although not technically considered double jeopardy, because the Fort Smith charges were different from those in Seattle, their complaints of double-dipping obviously resonated with the jury.

At the Seattle racketeering trial in 1985 Bruce Carroll Pierce appeared at first to have spent his life helping customers at the local hardware store and taking the kids camping on the weekend instead of soldiering for The Order. Twenty-eight months later in Fort Smith, he seemed weary and defeated, an ordinary man turned killer, then turned again into a permanent prisoner.
⁸

Three years of prison had visibly aged David Lane. His sandy hair had turned gray, his sidearm had been traded for a pair of reading glasses, his six-and-a-half-foot frame was drawn and thinned. Once a Klansman, he had been central to The Order and he was already serving long prison
sentences.
⁹
Richard Scutari was testament to the ever-changing definition of “whiteness” in the late twentieth century. His dark features, medium build, and elaborate tattoos were more suggestive of a Mediterranean pirate than a Teutonic knight. (The Scutari district of Istanbul is not in Europe but in Asia.) The Klan in the 1920s had marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to keep his kind of visage offshore. Of all those indicted for racketeering, Scutari avoided arrest the longest. He wasn’t captured until March 1986, long after the Seattle trial had ended. The federals didn’t want to go to the expense and trouble of putting him on trial alone, so they convinced him to plead guilty to racketeering by promising not to indict his wife, Michelle, and put his children in foster homes. His gallantry came to naught, however, and his wife filed for divorce and testified against him at Fort Smith.
¹⁰
Andrew Barnhill, like Scutari, had come into the movement through the guns and survivalism circuit. He was recruited into The Order at the age of twenty-six and was already serving a forty-year sentence when marched to the Fort Smith courthouse in chains.
¹¹

Ardie McBrearty was the last of The Order soldiers added to the indictment. McBrearty had been in court against the IRS since the 1970s. Clever and amiable, he could have been a successful town square attorney, eating breakfast in a diner every morning and chatting with the same crowd of farmers, office clerks, and shopkeepers for forty years. Instead, he had joined the Posse Comitatus and wound up giving stress analyzer tests for The Order and setting up its phone communications system. Now, at age sixty, he was already serving a forty-year sentence and facing another jury.
¹²

The most tenuously connected to any conspiracy was Robert Smalley, a small-time Fort Smith gun dealer who had been convicted in Seattle of racketeering and sentenced to five years. Adding Smalley, a local firearms dealer, to this sedition case only troubled the prosecution and added to the perception that small-fry “soldiers” like him were unfairly facing double jeopardy.
¹³

A third set of defendants had little direct dealings with Bob Mathews’s Order but had been party to the acts swirling around the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. They were charged with conspiracy to kill federal officials and various related weapons violations. Presumably, prosecutors reasoned that lumping together the seditious conspiracy case with the conspiracy to murder case would save money and time, since the major witnesses were the same for both sets of charges. As events turned out, however, combining these two prosecutions turned
these supposed crimes into an unwieldy hybrid of charges. Economy of scale doesn’t always increase the profit margin.

Prosecutors contended the murder conspiracy was hatched in December 1983 to avenge the death of Gordon Kahl. Bill Wade and his thirty-year-old son, Ray Wade, were native Arkansans, farmers like Kahl who believed the government was in Satanic hands. Bill Wade had owned the concrete-walled cabin in which another couple, the Ginters, had harbored Kahl. The Wades believed the cops had set fire to their cabin to cover up this badly bungled operation. They had asked for a grand jury investigation of the whole affair. When that failed, they filed a pro se lawsuit, seeking compensation for damages to their property. That too died on the vine. Meanwhile, the Ginters, who had rented the cabin from the Wades and harbored Kahl, were brought to trial before H. Franklin Waters, a federal judge in Fort Smith. The Ginters were convicted on harboring charges. And it was this Judge Waters who was the supposed object of the murder plot. In this conspiracy charge, Bill Wade and Ray Wade were joined by Lambert Miller, a former member of the CSA; David McGuire, who had once been married to the CSA chief Ellison’s daughter; and Richard Wayne Snell.
¹⁴

Snell stood out from the other defendants on several counts. He was the only one indicted for both conspiracy to murder and seditious conspiracy. And he was already on death row for the 1983 murder of a Texarkana, Arkansas, pawnshop owner. He was also serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of a black state trooper. At Fort Smith, the fifty-seven-year-old looked like a walking stack of ashes. His wife, Mary, stayed with Bob and Dorothy Miles in a rented duplex and attended the trial every day, just as she dutifully published his prison newsletter,
The Last Call Bulletin
. The events in this Fort Smith courtroom were an empty formality for Snell. For federal prosecutors the trial was to go from bad to worse.
¹⁵

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Snyder opened the prosecution’s case with a dizzying ninety-minute recitation. He detailed the founding of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord on the Arkansas border in 1981, the formation of The Order in 1983, the fall of both in 1985, and every crime in between. Weapons were collected, bombs set off, banks robbed, murders committed, and moneys distributed. But Snyder talked little about the connection between this crime spree and an actual seditious conspiracy. Instead, he practically pinned his entire case on a late-night gathering in July 1983 at the Aryan Nations camp. It was at that moment, he argued, the conspiracy was hatched. At this
meeting Robert Miles, Louis Beam, and Richard Butler, among others, had made plans for the violent overthrow of the government. The logical conclusion of Snyder’s opening remarks placed the prosecution in a precarious position. If the evidence didn’t support his argument about the July 1983 meeting, then there was no conspiracy.
¹⁶

The defendants’ opening statements varied with their current status before the courts. Those already convicted of crimes in other courts assailed the credibility of government witnesses. Those not already so convicted added a defense of free speech to the argument. The most stunning opening was Louis Beam’s, delivered as if he were once more on the stump before a crowd of potential Klan sympathizers.

“The only reason I’m here is because I said what I think,” Louis Beam said as he rose from the crowded defense table. “If the Constitution is still alive, I’m innocent.”

He discussed the evidence that would be presented against him and told the jury which witnesses he would call in his own defense. He talked about his early Klan membership and his relationships with the other defendants and painted himself as an idealist who had disappointed his mother. (And who in the jury box hadn’t disappointed their mothers at one time or another?) “Junior, quit this and get a good job,” Beam said his mother told him repeatedly. Beam claimed he sacrificed financial success as a computer consultant for his political and religious beliefs. He admitted setting up movement computer bulletin boards in Idaho, Houston, Dallas, North Carolina, Chicago, and Little Rock but denied they were used for secret communications.

If the conspiracy was supposedly set at Butler’s home, as the government alleged, Beam told the jury, then he missed it. He must have been changing his daughter’s diaper, and he called the government’s case the “baby diaper conspiracy.” In fact, the discussion around Butler’s kitchen table was “just a coffee break,” he told the jury, and the 1983 Aryan Nations meeting “just like a hundred others I’ve been to.”
¹⁷

Beam ended with a speech he had given to dozens of audiences: how he had come home from Vietnam to find antiwar demonstrators burning an American flag. In fact, it was taken almost verbatim from his booklet
Essays of a Klansman
:

As I sat there watching the flag disintegrate, rage and bitterness began to engulf me—the flames consuming the flag changed to flames enveloping an armored personnel carrier in the Hobo Woods north of Saigon. The cheers of the demonstrators became screams of a nineteen year old soldier over his radio as he burned to death, trapped inside what was fast becoming his coffin. The clapping of hands as the flag fell to the ground,
became the deafening roar of my M-60 machine gun as I literally melted the barrel in an attempt to pin down the enemy long enough for the dying soldier’s friends to reach him. Finally, at last, came the laughter of those demonstrators as they spit on the ashes at their feet, blending in my mind with the sobs of grown men as I remembered the armored personnel carrier disappearing in a ball of orange flame.
¹⁸

The courtroom was spellbound by Beam’s soft Texas accent and Vietnam stories. The wave of empathy from the jury was palpable. They were teary-eyed and visibly exhausted.
¹⁹
How could they convict this genuine American war hero of sedition? He was no dark-skinned, curly-haired Puerto Rican bomber.

The prosecution’s case disintegrated from there. Of the forty-eight pieces of evidence seized when Beam had been arrested in Mexico, for example, the judge allowed only two, citing the gross disregard by the arresting officers for American constitutional protections. One piece he did allow was Beam’s
Bruder Schweigen
medallion, the one worn by Order members. To win this seditious conspiracy trial, however, Assistant U.S. Attorney Snyder needed to do more than simply reprosecute The Order.
²⁰

Snyder paraded a string of broken white supremacists before the jury to present evidence, just as prosecutors had done at the Seattle RICO trial. This witness had procured illegal weapons; another described bank robberies and counterfeiting; a third told of taking secret oaths and making plans to divvy up the country between “civil administrators.” A defendant’s former wife testified she had helped edit a “declaration of war,” written by Bob Mathews.

One of the weakest government witnesses was Glenn Miller. The formerly ferocious chief of the White Patriot Party claimed to have given up his hatreds and become a born-again Christian. He whimpered and crawled before the jury, displaying malice toward none but cynicism toward all. Miller’s testimony was a particularly bitter moment for Robert Miles, who had touted the retired army sergeant as the next best thing after Hitler’s storm trooper boss Ernst Röhm. During a brighter, whiter moment Miles had written of Miller: “Good-looking straight Aryan men, rank on rank, file on file, legion on legion, stand behind him because they trust him, because they have faith in him, and because he has never betrayed either their trust or their faith.”
²¹

If Miller disappointed his former Aryan comrades, he didn’t do the government’s case any good either. According to another prosecution witness, for example, Miller had been assigned control of the Southeast region of the United States by the conspiracy’s supposed “civil administrators.”
But instead of confirming the testimony of that other witness, Miller contradicted it. When a defense attorney asked Miller about being an “administrator,” he denied any knowledge of it.
²²
Rather than risk a lengthy redirect, prosecutors pulled Miller off the witness stand before he had warmed up the seat.
²³

Glenn Miller was simply unconvincing. James Ellison, the paramilitary preacher with two wives and a cultful of followers at the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm, drowned the government’s case in a sea of absurdity. The prosecution needed Ellison to testify that the numerous criminal acts were tied together in a single conspiracy. Otherwise its case consisted mainly of “speech” (protected by the First Amendment). Because of his past role at the center of events, he was the one government witness who might have proved its case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Snyder spent two days with Ellison, plodding through evidence in each of the indictment’s four counts. On the plot to kill federal officials in Arkansas, Ellison said he had the names, dates, and places because he was there, conspiring along with the rest at every step. On the government’s most important count, seditious conspiracy, he claimed the plot to overthrow the government had been launched at private leadership meetings held during the Aryan Nations congress in the summer of 1983.