Blood and Politics (31 page)

From the very beginning defense attorneys destabilized the prosecution’s presentation. Deday LaRene objected to Snyder’s opening questions five times in the first ten minutes, throwing both the assistant U.S. attorney and his witness off-balance. To the evident dissatisfaction of the judge, an hour into his testimony Ellison was still talking about events in 1982, long before the conspiracies at issue were supposedly hatched. Snyder also incurred the judge’s reproach by attempting to use Ellison’s testimony as a vehicle to reintroduce emotion-laden Nazi lingo and swastikas, a tactic the judge had deemed prejudicial and proscribed during the trial’s first witnesses. “I am not going to allow any more evidence in about Nazi flags and swastikas,” the judge declared. “You have run that into the ground.”
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Further, Snyder often elicited testimony from Ellison on specific events without establishing to which count or defendant the evidence was pertinent. If Snyder had succeeded in bundling all the incidents together into one undifferentiated incriminating mass, then stronger pieces of evidence could have helped carry the prosecution’s weakest claims. But this attempted bundling failed after it was challenged by the entire defense team, from the least literate pro se defendant to the most masterful, Deday LaRene.

In a moment that exemplified the prosecution’s ineptness, Snyder
attempted to introduce an unflattering videotape of Louis Beam by having Ellison testify that the tape was a complete reproduction of Beam’s speech at the 1983 Aryan Nations congress. After approximately a half hour of courtroom viewing, however, it was clear that the tape was not complete. It was a double whammy: not only did the judge disallow it as evidence, but Ellison’s prior testimony that the tape was complete proved to be one more instance in which he clearly did not tell the truth.
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Only when Ellison rattled on effortlessly about weapons—the differences between bolt-action rifles and fully automatic assault weapons or how his troops standardized their ammunition caliber—was he convincing and transparently truthful.
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Snyder presented the heart of the government’s case in a series of questions about the seditious conspiracy itself, agreements at private meetings to form a coordinated national leadership and launch military operations. Ellison mapped out the plot’s parameters: The four central figures were supposed to be Robert Miles, Richard Butler, Louis Beam, and himself. The commander in chief was Robert Miles, who Ellison said oversaw the “general operation” and was constantly urging others to rob banks in order to accumulate necessary funds. Richard Butler was in charge of the Northwest (a demotion, it should be noted, from Butler’s media-mythic role as Aryan Nations’ national leader). Louis Beam, in this scenario, was to run the Southwest territory and oversee the national conspiracy’s computer operations. And by his own account, Ellison’s job was to train the soldiers, raise funds, and oversee Arkansas.
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As proof of the seditious agreement, Ellison offered the flimsiest of evidence. At one evening side caucus, he said, he had passed a sheet of paper around the room for everyone to sign. “When the paper came back to me, after making the complete circuit, I took the paper and I read off each name. And I looked at each man and I said, I hope you realize that by being present in this meeting and by signing this paper that you are guilty of conspiracy and treason against this government. And I said your presence here and your willingness to participate in this meeting makes you guilty, so therefore, you better be serious about what you are doing.”
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Defense cross-examination quickly homed in on Ellison’s recollections of these agreements and meetings. How many meetings were there, Mr. Ellison? In your grand jury testimony you said there were two meetings. Now you are telling the jury about three meetings. Which one is it? Eager to catch him in this obvious discrepancy, each defendant and his attorney tried to trip up Ellison on this issue. Finally the judge
tired of the questions and said he had heard enough about the number of meetings.

Then the defense challenged Ellison’s characterization of the meetings. In direct testimony Ellison described one private meeting as a “young leadership” gathering. But on cross-examination he was forced to admit there was nothing youthful about several of the participants. Was John Ross Taylor at this meeting? defendant David Lane asked. Yes, Ellison answered. And how old was Taylor? In his seventies, Ellison replied.
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The jury could not help noticing that Ellison’s testimony eroded piece by self-contradictory piece. He was forced to confess that he had decided to become a government witness after being denied parole. He also admitted that he wanted favorable treatment for himself and his family. “The jury’s tax money is going to go to provide for the support of your two wives as part of this deal?” one defense attorney asked rhetorically.
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After two days of cross-examination the defense had whittled Ellison’s expansive claims down to the self-interested nub of a lying, thieving sociopath. The sharpest cuts were delivered by Louis Beam in one quick set of questions.

Beam asked Ellison to describe his coronation as King of the Ozarks.

“I didn’t know that it happened,” Ellison answered.

“There was no ceremony where oil was poured over your head and you were declared James of the Ozarks?” Beam asked again.

“I believe that you’re confusing an anointing with oil with a coronation.”

“Okay. Well, then describe to the jury the anointing.”

“On one occasion at CSA when Robert Millar and a number of his people were present and a number of people, some of the defendants, were present, Robert Millar did anoint me as James of the Ozarks, or King of the Ozarks,” Ellison replied.
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After Louis Beam’s questions finished revealing James Ellison’s obviously fanciful pretensions, it was hard to believe anything he said about seditious agreements or anything else.

The defense’s weakest spot was Bruce Carroll Pierce. When he was first arrested, Pierce had told FBI officials that The Order had distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in robbery proceeds. Among the recipients he named, some were now his codefendants. His statement could have potentially linked Miles, Butler, and Beam directly to The Order and made the idea of a conspiracy much more plausible.
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When the U.S. attorney tried to introduce the statement as evidence, Pierce naturally wanted it suppressed. He claimed it was given under duress. The FBI, he said, had threatened to arrest his wife, Julie, and send their children to foster homes unless he cooperated. Pierce’s spirits sank when Judge Arnold said he would probably accept the statement as evidence.

Ashamed at his own collaboration with the government, Pierce then attempted to plead guilty. Admission of guilt by any one defendant would have harmed the case of all, however, and the judge wouldn’t immediately accept his plea. It was at that moment that Robert Miles’s sage leadership made a difference. Miles forgave Pierce whatever statements he had previously made and helped dissuade him from giving up. Miles had no ill will toward Pierce for his momentary weakness. “What Bruce did in order to save his own wife and children was understandable,” Miles wrote later. “None blamed him for trying . . . He does not deserve any criticism. He deserves our support and comradeship.”
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Pierce then withdrew his guilty plea. Judge Arnold ultimately decided the statement was inadmissible because it was not a spontaneous confession. The judge’s decision severely hurt the prosecution, one of several blows the government’s case received during the proceedings. Before the defense even called their first witness, the judge dismissed the charges against the former Fort Smith gun dealer Robert Smalley. At that point, every observer knew the prosecution could sink.
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The defense case was short. It was summed up by Louis Beam, whose closing statement argued that he and the others were protected by First Amendment freedoms. Once again he invoked history, albeit badly: “In McCarthy’s case, they called it communism and said they were trained to infiltrate the government. They’re calling us Nazis and saying we attempted to overthrow the government.”
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After seven weeks of trial and more than seven hundred thousand dollars in expenses the case went to the jury.
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In three days the verdict came back: not guilty, all defendants on all counts.

After the trial Robert Miles and Richard Butler held an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps. The trial had been about freedom of speech, they argued. The verdict had proved that the First Amendment was still alive.

Then they walked across the street to the Sebastian County courthouse grounds and celebrated at the foot of the Confederate war memorial. Kirk Lyons raised a Confederate battle flag on the courthouse pole as the Aryans mixed with the assembled television cameras and print reporters.
“This flag, this statue, represent the ideals that I believe in,” Beam told a Fort Smith reporter.
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The irony went unremarked. The last of the prosecutions in the feds’ extended multiyear crackdown lay in dust.

It is a basic law of Newton: for every climax there is an anticlimax. James Ellison served the balance of a much-reduced sentence for racketeering and eventually resettled at the Elohim City compound in Oklahoma. Wayne Snell went back to death row in Texarkana. Andrew Barnhill, Ardie McBrearty, Richard Scutari, and David Lane were taken back into the bowels of the federal penitentiary system for long terms. Lane may have walked out of the courtroom in chains, but he still regarded himself as a modern-day Viking warrior. During the next ten years his fourteen-word motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children,” was adopted by skinheads in Europe and North America. He became more important to the movement as an imprisoned martyr than he ever was as a Klansman on the street in Denver. He died in prison at age sixty-nine in 2007.
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Ray Wade, Bill Wade, and Lambert Miller left the trial and tried to put their lives back together. Juror Carolyn Slater returned to her job as an inspector at the local Whirlpool factory. But she couldn’t forget defendant David McGuire. Almost as soon as she had slipped through Judge Arnold’s voir dire, Slater had fallen in love with the youngest defendant. During the proceedings, they had exchanged furtive glances and laughed with each other. When he was found innocent, he mouthed the words “thank you” to her. So after the trial Carolyn wrote David a friendly letter and mailed it to his attorney, who forwarded it to him in Indiana. David followed up quickly with a telephone call. Three months later the former defendant and the former juror were living together. They married and settled down, not far from the courthouse.
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A second juror expressed, after the trial ended, agreement with some of The Order’s actions, and a third said that he admired Louis Beam.
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Richard Butler returned to northern Idaho, but he never reestablished the supremacy of his twenty-acre camp in the Aryan constellation. Louis Beam began the next stage of his career.

Of all the former defendants, the sage and venerated Robert Miles’s fate came to symbolize the meaning of the white supremacist victory in Fort Smith. Miles should have been excited and happy after the verdict, and he did perfunctorily denounce the government and the movement’s enemies at the time. But he and his wife, Dorothy, soon began to despair. Why had the movement failed to win more support, Miles wondered,
when white people should naturally recognize their racial destiny? The vast majority of white people were still lost in a cesspool of racial mongrelism and Jewish commercialism, he sadly concluded. “America . . . is a land of sheep. They are content to graze, to romp in the grass and to procreate.”
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He was tired of the vanguardist dilemma. “Can we endure and survive by simply shaking our heads, reading more of our own literature about our foes, and then go on about our lives in the midst of the sewerage?” he asked.

Miles grew increasingly bitter about what appeared to be a hollow victory at Fort Smith. He began to receive letters that recycled old rumors that he had worked for one of the secret services. Few sent any financial support, and he faced paying his attorney’s fees alone. Each letter was a bitter pill. He had gone to Fort Smith to fight for the movement, but the movement had disappointed him. “After the trial ended we knew there would be some jealousies and nose out of joint reactions,” he wrote. But he wasn’t “prepared for the Alice-In-Wonderland reasoning” of his comrades.

Miles retreated into a shell of cynicism. “We fight ofttimes despite the ones on our side, rather than because of them,” he decided. Instead of looking forward, he started to spend his time reminiscing about past Klan comrades.
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Then, in May 1991, his life was further complicated when he and his daughter, Marian, were subpoenaed for their fingerprints in a North Dakota bomb case. By then he was spending all his time caring for his seriously ill wife, Dorothy. They had always been close and had occasionally signed their newsletters “Fafnir and the Dragon Lady,” the only couple in the movement to present themselves to others as such. When Dorothy died of heart failure in May 1992, Bob was at her side. Without her he was completely adrift. “She was my raison d’être,” he wrote. “Now no reason, no purpose.”
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About six weeks later Miles awakened in the middle of the night to investigate a noise outside his house, which was on a remote farmstead. He was hit on the head from behind and hospitalized for two days. Some thought he was the victim of ZOG or its lackeys. Others thought he was silenced before he could spill any secrets. His daughter, Marian, never called the police. “It was not my father’s wish at the time, nor is it mine now, to invite the police on our property.”
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