by Mike Markel
“She’s an attorney. Her job is to put up a wall whenever she can.”
“Yeah, and my job is to bust through that wall.”
“I understand that, Karen, and I agree with you. But I’d rather not signal her that we’ve got her figured out. That gives her information that she can use to obstruct us. It’s better if she thinks we’re stupid. That way, she won’t worry about us that much, and we’ll have more options. If she thinks we’re a threat to her, she’s going to work harder to block us.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Why don’t people let me be me? It’s not like I screw up or anything.
Chapter 10
“You already know what the 1488 means,” Nick Corelli said. He was throwing a PowerPoint presentation onto the pale yellow wall of the conference room. He clicked to another slide, showing photos of 1488’s spray-painted on the wall of a synagogue, tattooed across an inmate’s chest, and beneath a swastika on a flag.
“The two different fourteen-word slogans were written by a man named David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group The Order.” The photo of Lane showed a man in his forties, gray hair going on white, full beard, dark, piercing eyes, and an expression that said, Don’t dare fuck with me.
Corelli had just arrived this morning. The chief had met with the prosecutor. They agreed that Weston’s murder was a hate crime, and that we should bring in the FBI.
Corelli was about my age, a couple of inches under six feet. Maybe one-ninety or two-hundred, stocky and powerful. His hair was shoe-polish black, thick and curly, cut short. He wore a full beard, black with some red flecks in it. He kept it trimmed, but down around the neck it looked like he was losing the battle. The thick chest hair, sticking out of his collar, was moving in on the bottom of the beard. His skin was kind of Mediterranean olive.
When he introduced himself five minutes ago, I said, “Agent Corelli—”
“Call me Nick, okay?” He showed his teeth, which were unnaturally bright. It was one of those smiles that appeared suddenly and then disappeared just as suddenly, like a guillotine coming down.
“Lane died in the Federal Correctional Complex in Terra Haute, Indiana, in 2007. He was serving a 190-year sentence for various crimes, including the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish lawyer and radio host in Denver in 1984.” Up came a photo of Berg, sitting at his microphone. “Berg was the original shock jock—liberal, sarcastic, totally obnoxious.”
Ryan said, “That the reason Lane targeted him?”
Nick said, “Berg used to go after white supremacists all the time on his talk show. One night, he’s getting out of his car in his driveway, and four guys, including Lane, put thirteen bullets into him. Which was the plot of The Turner Diaries.”
“Say again?” I was losing the thread.
“The Turner Diaries was a novel published in 1978 by a white supremacist, about how these guys killed a Jewish radio host when he stepped out of his car in his driveway.”
“Lane and his buddies knew about this book?”
“They used it as a script. Lane’s group, The Order, was named after the white-power group in the novel.” Nick looked at me. “Know who else liked that book? Timothy McVeigh.”
Ryan said, “Oklahoma City?”
Nick nodded. “In the book, they blow up a big government building in Washington, D.C. Kill a bunch of people.” He turned back to his laptop. “Lane wrote the two versions of the fourteen words.” Up came the next slide, showing the quotations. “And he found the eighty-eight words from Hitler’s book. The number 88 also stands for Heil Hitler, with H being the eighth letter of the alphabet.” Nick paused, his gaze going from me to Ryan, then back to me. “Any questions so far?”
“No,” I said. “Keep going.”
“All right,” Nick said. “I’m going to show you some video from an interrogation of a white supremacist that I did a few months ago in Arizona. His name was Lawrence Pinelli. He’d been in trouble since he was fourteen. One of his running buddies flipped on him when we were questioning him about buying large quantities of fertilizer. There’d been some explosives stolen from construction companies in the area. We got a probable-cause warrant and searched Pinelli’s trailer, where we found explosives and triggers that we traced back to the construction companies, all kinds of bomb-making stuff, white-power literature, lists of known white-power guys, some outside, some in prison.
“First scene, he’s been in custody maybe six or eight hours. I was trying to see if there was a target and a date. I’d already explained that terrorism is a federal offense, punishable by death. Told him we had the guy who’d given him up, that the prosecutor was making the deal with this guy for a reduced sentence. Explained how he’d never be able to get back in the brotherhood now, how we’d take care of protective custody, witness-relocation, whatever it took. Nothing was working.”
Ryan said, “Killing innocent women and children?”
“We’d already tried that. We’ve got all kinds of pictures and videos of victims from Oklahoma City. Kids who were maimed. Everything. He told us we’re at war, and civilians get hurt in war. We’ve seen that before: collateral damage makes them feel more powerful—like they’re really soldiers on a holy mission. Remember, a lot of these young guys would be rejected by the Army because of priors, no high-school diploma, low IQ. Part of the appeal of these white-power groups is that the uniforms and flags and all the paramilitary props make these losers feel like they’re part of a larger cause. Anyway, he was fine with the idea of killing innocent people. So I tried a different tack.”
The video started, with a date and time stamp in the corner showing it as 11:42 pm, in late February. It was in color, a sharp picture. We still use a black-and-white VCR. Pinelli looked about twenty-five, white, with close-cropped hair and a goatee. Swastika tat in black on the right side of his neck, a red thunderbolt with black edges on the left side. He had on a dark brown t-shirt, couple of long rips, with some kind of jagged logo and the words “White Strike” under it. His right arm was cuffed to a bar on the top of the table. He looked cocky, defiant, even with a fresh two-inch gash over his right eye, a pink bruise on his left cheek, and a busted lip that was dripping blood. Nick looked like he looks now: white shirt and tie, but his jacket was hanging on the back of the chair opposite the suspect.
In the video, Pinelli is sitting there, chin held high, Nick is pacing. Finally, he sits in the chair opposite Pinelli and starts questioning him.
“You know Immigration and Customs is part of Homeland Security, Lawrence?”
Lawrence shrugs. I’ve seen my kid do that. It’s halfway between “I knew that” and “Who gives a shit?”
“Immigration and Customs is in charge of border security. Starting around May, when the desert is 115, 120, they get a lot of bodies on Burrito Alley. You knew that, right?”
This time the guy didn’t even react.
“You know what they do with those corpses? They bring ’em in for processing.” Nick paused. “Except when they don’t.”
The guy raised his eyebrow, like he was saying, You want to get to the point?
“If the body is too badly decomposed, too bloated, they just don’t want to go to the trouble getting it into the truck. And the paperwork. It’s hours. So what they do, especially if there’s more than one or two of these bodies—all full of flies and shit—they just bury them out there in the desert.”
“The fuck do I care?” the guy said. “More dead Mexis, the better.”
“Well, here’s the point, Lawrence. Sometimes, it’s not just Mexis end up in those trenches. I know three cases where U.S. citizens ended up there with ’em. It’s not local or state police who put ’em there. It’s the feds. They get really pissed when they pick up guys like you. You see, they’re not allowed to rough you up too bad to get the information out of you. But if they’ve got you in custody and a bomb goes off—that looks really bad, them not being able to get a time and a target from you.
“So they want to get
you out of the system. Make sure nobody’s gonna ask how come they didn’t prevent it. You see where I’m going, Lawrence? A bunch of guys with Immigration and Customs want to send a signal to the white-pride groups that they can’t go around killing innocent people—and if they do, some of their own people are gonna pay the price. A guy like you, low-level, you’re not really worth that much to local law enforcement. But to Immigration? If you can stop a bombing? They can set you up in a new city, new identity. Hell, they’ll even pay to get your tats removed. But if it goes the other way, as soon as it happens, you don’t have any cards left to play. You could have an accident, out in the desert.”
Nick paused the video.
I said, “What’d the shithead do?”
“Nothing,” Nick said. “That’s my point. He didn’t break. Even a low-level soldier like that was willing to take the chance that we were making a deal with his buddy, willing to take the fall. We held him a few more days, tried all kinds of things on him. He didn’t crack.”
Ryan said, “Was there a terrorist act?”
“Not exactly sure,” Nick said. “We think they aborted because we had two of their guys. But a couple of weeks later, a Mexican woman married to a white guy in that same town disappeared and hasn’t been found. We think it was that group. After a few days, we charged Lawrence Pinelli with theft and some other minor offenses, but the federal prosecutor didn’t think they had enough to make any terrorism charges stick.”
“Did you ever get anything useful from him?”
“No. He was fine telling us about his movement. He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. He’d done a lot of reading. He knew all about how the feds did the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, so they’d have to pick up the real patriots, which would lead to a great armed revolt across the country; how the Mexicans are taking over the country by getting onto the school boards and local government.”
I said, “So you think you might have prevented an explosion.”
Nick said, “Way I’d put it, I think we postponed an explosion—and probably cost that Mexican woman her life. My point is that these guys are pretty tough. We walked right up to the edge on what we could do to this guy. He stood tall. That’s what we’re dealing with here, with Senator Weston’s killer.”
Ryan said, “You thinking Weston’s killer is a couple of notches up from a guy like Lawrence Pinelli?”
“Yeah, I think so, Ryan,” Nick said. “Pinelli was a soldier, just muscle. Not senior enough to carry out a mission. But Weston’s killer, his identity is based on what he believes is a superior understanding of how the world works. He might be anything: a professional guy, businessman, tradesman. Could be a cop. Even if he’s unskilled, unemployed, he doesn’t see himself as a stupid man who doesn’t have what it takes to keep a good job. And since he probably spends a lot of time running around in the woods with like-minded patriots, he certainly doesn’t see himself as lazy. He’s not a loser; he’s a victim of a rigged system.”
“Okay,” I said. “Because he has this special understanding that average people—including cops—don’t have, he can give us a head start and still outrun us.”
“And if it turns out we catch him because he didn’t outthink us or outrun us,” Nick Corelli said, “we still don’t have a right to put him in prison because we don’t have any jurisdiction: he’s not a citizen of Montana or the United States. He’s a ‘sovereign citizen’ who owes no allegiance to any state government or to the nation. Plus, since the president is a Fourteenth Amendment citizen—not a sovereign citizen—even if he gets the needle or dies inside a federal facility, he’s still smarter than we are.”
“In other words,” I said, “he really is kind of a dumb fuck.”
Corelli looked at me, hard, and didn’t say anything for a long time. “I’m not sure you got my point, Karen. Even a guy like Lawrence Pirelli is extremely dangerous. If you don’t understand that, I can’t have you on the case. You’ll get yourself killed. Maybe Ryan. Maybe me. Maybe some unis.”
“No, Nick, I’m sorry. I totally get what you’re saying. It’s just a stupid thing I do sometimes. I try to distance myself from the murderer a little bit, for some objectivity. Calling him a dumb fuck is my way of telling myself he’s no evil genius who’s going to outsmart us. He’s not going to transform me and Ryan into paranoid Nazi zombies. That’s not gonna happen, because he’s just another dumb fuck, and me and Ryan are smarter than him. I’m just not feeling that good. And what you’re telling us—it’s just weirding me out a little. I’m absolutely taking it serious.”
“When I was down on the Arizona border, we had an op went bad. We lost two agents and a detective. I knew all of them,” Nick said. “They were all tortured. All three of them. We needed dental records to identify them.”
I felt myself getting woozy. “I’m sorry. No excuse for what I said.”
“You think you’ve seen men like this before? You’re wrong. You haven’t. What’s different about these guys is that they have no interest in money. They’re not like cigarette smugglers or drug runners. What these guys do, it’s not a business. These guys are terrorists. The world they live in—it’s not the world we live in. We’re not merely obstacles to what they want to achieve. We are worse than that: we are evil.” He paused. “And I need you to understand this. If they capture you, they will kill you. So if you don’t feel up to this, tell me now. I’ll take you off the case. No penalties.”
“I’m in.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m in. How do you want us to go at the Weston investigation?”
“Start by telling me what you’ve got so far.” Nick was shutting down his slide show.
“We reached out to this professor, Willson Fredericks, a historian at the university. Heard of him?”
“Name rings a bell.”
“Great credentials. Knows everything about Nazis. He confirmed everything you said about the patriot movement.”
Nick said, “Was that helpful?”
“Yes, it was,” Ryan said. “I think we understand the general outlines of what these groups are up to and why.”
“He give you anything you can work with?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Nick,” I said. “He told us a lot of stuff—we met with him yesterday—but we’ve gotta figure out what he was actually saying.”
“How do you mean?”
“Some of the things he said didn’t add up. Like when we asked him if he’d ever been to Lake Hollow—you know, the Montana Patriot Front—“
“I’m familiar with them.”
“So we asked him if he’d ever been there, and he says he’s seen it on the Internet, which doesn’t square with a bunch of articles he’s published, which put him out there doing research.”
“You know,” Nick said, “since he writes about these groups, it’s quite possible he has been there, doing research. These groups are pretty open to researchers. They believe that all publicity is good publicity. You know, if people just understand what they’re up to, everyone will love them and sign up.”
“So we’re asking him what he knows about the Montana Patriot Front, and he’s telling us what a sleazeball this Christopher Barry is, how he’s a kinda penny-ante fraud guy, no record of violence. Then he drops this comment about how he thinks the group might be violent. We were wondering whether that meant he knew something about them or just wanted us to scratch our heads for a while.”
“Hmm, that’s odd,” Nick said. “I’ve done quite a bit of research on Christopher Barry and the MPF, and I’ve never seen anybody tie them to any violence. You two thinking they might be involved in the Weston case?”
“We’re not thinking anything, Nick,” I said. “But it’s possible. Them being the local Nazi group. At this point, we’re just trying to figure out what kind of game Willson Fredericks is playing.”
“Anything else he said that’s bothering you?”
“We did some research, turned up some things we don’t know quite what to do with.”
“I looked at a bunch of videos from the Montana Patriot Front channel on YouTube. Obviously, I don’t know as much about these groups as you do, so maybe I’m way off, but it seems to me there’s some real knuckle-draggers out there.”
“What specifically did you see on those videos?”
“Like I said, it may be nothing, but one of the speeches said some of their guys have carried out operations, and a lot of talk about how we have to go out and kill blacks and Jews and Muslims and Mexicans.”
“I know what you’re referring to, Karen,” Nick said, nodding his head. “That stuff is repulsive. But there’s a kind of adolescent macho side to these groups. They live off of donations from mainstream citizens who think the country’s gone to hell. The men, in particular, like to grunt and curse and act like they’re going to step in because the government isn’t taking care of business. But by and large, it’s just talk. Another thing: these patriot groups get into piss fights with each other to see who’s more aggressive. Chances are, you see these groups putting videos up on the Web, they’re not doing anything but strutting around. What about you, Ryan, you see anything you want to talk about?”
“I was telling Karen, in his articles I saw this name popping up: Benjamin Connors?”
“That’s Connors with a C?” Nick shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.” He jotted down the name on a legal pad.
“This Benjamin Connors provides a lot of information to Fredericks about the Montana patriots, but I can’t identify him. No job, no location, no publications. It’s like Fredericks made him up in order to get some quotes to put in his articles.”
Nick said, “I don’t know anything about Fredericks, but it’s possible he’s just cutting corners with his scholarship.” He paused, a frown on his face. “What do you want to do?”
I said, “One more thing we already did. We interviewed Cynthia Brandt, the university attorney.”