After ten seconds ticked by, I raised my hands in surrender. “All right,” I said, “I will be a Hot Nasty. Or at least I’ll try.”
And so the Kurt Blank–led Hot Nasties made their debut on the puny stage at Gary’s, the week that the bar reopened to local punks. The place was packed to the walls, well over the legal limit. Hearing the band’s songs again made for an emotional night. Sister Betty wept openly, while her older sister covertly wiped away mascara streaks on her cheeks. X, sitting with them at one of the tavern’s miniscule round tables just off the dance floor, asked if either Upchuck needed some Kleenex. “Doesn’t this make you even a little emotional, X?” Betty said, wiping her eyes.
“Sure,” he said. “But not sad. It’s good.”
The reconstituted Hot Nasties continued to play. Midway through our rendition of “The Secret of Immortality,” when Sister Betty was again bawling, X felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up: it was Mike the bouncer, signaling for him to follow. X followed Mike to the front of the bar.
Mike pushed open the door that led to Gary’s puny lobby entry. Waiting there, looking uncomfortable, were the two Chow brothers.
“We couldn’t let any more people in,” Mike said, “but they said they were here only to talk to you, anyway.”
“Thanks, Mike,” X said, as Mike disappeared back into the bar.
X glanced in the direction of Frank, another bouncer, who was immersed in that morning’s Sun. “Hey, guys,” X said to the Chow brothers. “It should be okay to talk here.”
“How do the Nasties sound?” Peter asked, sounding wistful.
“They sound pretty good,” X said. “It’s a bit bittersweet, though. Different.”
John nudged his brother. “So, we had some information we wanted to give you,” Peter whispered, glancing nervously in the direction of Frank, who remained totally disinterested. “You have to be careful what you do with it.”
“Of course,” X said. “What’s up?”
John spoke for the first time. “Have you ever heard of a town called Exeter?”
C H A P T E R 44
X was in the passenger seat, me in the back. Mike drove.
I fidgeted with my camera and tried to make conversation. “I thought bikers drove, you know, motorcycles, not family trucksters.”
“Family trucksters?” Mike asked, eyeing me in the rear-view.
“Station wagons,” X said, surveying the landscape slipping by on Interstate 95. “That’s what our parents drive. So Kurt calls them family trucksters.”
“Oh,” Mike said, chuckling. “Got it. Family trucksters. Well, it works for us today. I didn’t want to attract too much attention, and I don’t think we did.”
That’s actually kind of debatable, Mike.
The trip to Exeter, New Hampshire, had started early on Saturday morning and had been pretty uneventful, but we definitely hadn’t gone unnoticed. The town itself was like dozens of other small New England towns: a couple hockey rinks and football fields, a couple liquor stores, a couple grocery stores, a couple gun shops, one government office, one post office, one hairdresser, and several garages and churches. And the locals, all of them on super-high alert for any newcomers.
In Exeter, in recent weeks, there had been plenty of newcomers, and it seemed the locals didn’t much like it. There had been pickup trucks with muddied plates from places like Pennsylvania and Maine and Canada, all heading straight through town and out toward “that acreage.” There had been some big, foul-mouthed boys with shaved heads piling into the liquor stores and buying up as much cheap beer as they could. There had been the sound of gunshots — too many of them, out of season — echoing from the outskirts of town. And on one occasion, there had been a bespectacled reporter from the Portland Press Herald poking around, asking lots of pointed questions about the family who lived out on that acreage.
They didn’t like it, not any of it. Before the troublemakers arrived, Exeter had been a nice town, a quiet place, where older folks came to retire and the younger ones worked at shipbuilding or in the lumber mills. It was a conservative place, politically, but certainly no place for extremists.
For the trip to Exeter, Mike, X, and I abandoned our leather jackets and pulled on broken-in jean jackets instead. I tucked my spiky, bleached-blond hair under an old trucker’s cap and X took out his earrings. We took our lead from Mike.
It was kind of weird, this big old biker helping out a bunch of much younger punk rockers. We didn’t ask him why. But X’s hunch was that he liked the fact that we didn’t like cops, and he was angry that there had been a murder of a punk kid on his watch. Made sense.
Anyway, our first stop was the post office, where some old-timers had gathered for their regular Saturday morning exchange of gossip. As X and I hung back, Mike approached a couple of them. He told the elderly Exeter men that he was in the market for a couple of used generators and was looking for an acreage outside town where he’d heard they were for sale.
“Oh yeah,” one of the old-timers said, clearly unconvinced. “That place. I’d get my generators somewhere else, if I were you.”
It was the same story at a tavern, at a hockey rink, and in the parking lot outside one of the liquor stores. Nobody wanted to talk about “that place” — or at least nobody wanted to talk about it to a trio of strangers. Finally, outside a small school, the Living Faith Bible School, Mike found a man chopping away at ice at the edge of the walkway to the front doors. The man paused in his work and identified himself as Chester Stanwick, the pastor and principal. “Oh, yes,” Stanwick said. “I know the place. I know the family quite well, in fact.”
The family who lived on the acreage numbered five, Stanwick told us — “two young children, the mother, the mother-in-law, and him.”
Him, it seemed, was an angry, troubled man, according to the pastor.
Stanwick knew what Identity was, and he knew what the pseudo-crazy religion did to its true believers. A year before, he explained, the couple had enrolled their two daughters in the Living Faith Bible School. All had been fine for a while, he said. “Then, one day, one of the girls showed up with a book — or, it was more of a pamphlet, actually— something called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. She was showing the book to other students and talking to them about it,” Stanwick said. “When we found out what she was doing, we asked her to take the book home.”
The book was hate propaganda, banned in many countries. It tried to make the case that the Holocaust was a massive lie.
“The day after we sent the girl home with it, the father barged into my office, where I was meeting with a church elder. He yelled a few curses at me, and then he lunged across my desk and tried to take a shot at me. I saw it coming, so I was on my way in the opposite direction,” Stanwick said, laughing. “He hit me in the chest, but it didn’t hurt much. The church elder and I persuaded him to calm down and agree to a meeting with the church leadership, to arbitrate the dispute.”
At the meeting, Stanwick and other church members explained that they did not want their school associated with hate propaganda or Holocaust denial. The girls’ father was not impressed. He announced that they planned to immediately withdraw the girls from the school. “And we haven’t seen them since,” Stanwick said. He paused, carefully looking us over. “I don’t know who you fellows are, but I’m pretty sure you’re not just here to pick up a couple used generators. You should be very careful if you’re heading out there. He’s armed to the teeth.”
Great. Terrific.
After bidding the pastor farewell, we headed west out of Exeter in the direction of the acreage. A half-mile before where Chester Stanwick had said it was located, Mike spotted a state police cruiser parked directly behind a muddy, unmarked sedan. “Cops,” he said. “They may be here for the crazy fucker who lives there, but they may be here because someone tipped them off that the three of us were in town. I don’t think we need to be c
arded by the cops today, do you boys?”
“Nope,” we agreed, so Mike swung the station wagon around, back in the direction of the Interstate and Portland.
We rode back mostly in silence. Two hours later, we were back in the city. As Mike pulled up to the curb outside X’s, Patti and Betty Upchuck came rushing out of the house.
Uh-oh.
“What’s wrong?” X asked as he stepped out of the car.
“It’s two of the skinheads,” Patti said, looking a bit freaked out. “Wojcik and Babic. It’s all over the news.”
C H A P T E R 45
The severed heads of Peter Wojcik and Dragomir Babic had been found in their shared second-floor East Portland apartment, placed neatly on the countertop in their puny kitchen. The gruesome details became public a few days later because the killer, or killers, had taken well-lit Polaroids of the grisly scene and mailed them to the police reporter at the Sun and to Ron McLeod at the Press Herald. Neither paper published the photographs, of course, but — under a big, bold warning that “details contained in this news report may upset some readers” — they both printed detailed descriptions of what the photos showed. The disclaimer, of course, ensured that everyone read the details.
Reporters are con men.
Bit by bit, the rest of the details leaked out. A neighbor on the first floor had called the landlord and then the police when blood seeped through his bedroom ceiling. The responding officers found the bodies of Wojcik and Babic on a sheetless bed. Their tongues had been hacked out and tossed in a corner. On the wall above the bed, the number 88 had been smeared, a foot high, in their blood.
Subtle.
McLeod later told us that the police report said the apartment had contained little furniture, but two sawed-off shotguns were leaning against the wall in the bedroom. Stacked in the corners of the main room were hundreds of pamphlets and books generated by the Aryan Nations and the White Aryan Resistance. Some were the same as the ones that had been left for members of the X Gang and other Portland punks. On a wall in the bedroom was a large poster of Hitler. And in the living room, they had tacked up a swastika flag that looked old enough to have actually come from the Second World War.
Detectives Murphy and Savoie hadn’t been assigned to the case. Judge O’Sullivan’s very unpopular decision to toss out the skinheads’ guilty pleas and set them free had caused a lot of heartburn for Portland’s mayor, and for the Chief of Police. Chow and Wright had been assigned to the double murder, a fact that probably pissed off Murphy and Savoie big-time.
“Big, big mess,” Ron McLeod told us later on, over the phone. “Big mess.”
No shit, Sherlock.
C H A P T E R 46
X sat at his Selectric in his bedroom, the page blank-staring at him. He looked at his notes again and flipped through the photographs I had taken. Both me and Patti had advised him against what he was about to write. But he started typing anyway.
“A CONSPIRACY OF HATE AND MURDER,” he wrote, as a placeholder headline. He could change it later, but it would do for now. It fit.
What he was writing, he knew, might get him sued. It would make some angry people even angrier. It would make him more of a target than he already was. But, with so many now dead, and with so many hurt, and with no end in sight, he told us he felt he didn’t have much choice. He had to become the target. Patti and I didn’t like that strategy one bit, but he wouldn’t listen. I sat on his bed, strumming the Fender Patti had given him at Christmas, watching.
Fuck, he is so stubborn.
In the quiet of his bedroom, the sound of the typewriter keys seemed to be almost as loud as Eddie’s snare drum. As he finished a page and pulled it out, he’d hand it to me.
There is a cancer in the city’s corridors of power. It is a cancer that is spreading, one that has already resulted in four murders, one attempted murder, and a system that is as corrupt as it is incompetent.
The cancer is a toxic mix of neo-Nazism, white supremacy, and a hate group that literally seeks to wipe away everything that is modern and urban, and start all over again in a primitive, Far Right nirvana that will only accept so-called “Aryans.” And the organization that is supposed to be preventing this? The organization that is, instead, indifferent to this spreading cancer — or, perhaps, even secretly assisting it?
He paused for a moment, and then kept going.
The Portland police department and high-level sources have told the NCNA that Portland cops are suspected of possibly being complicit in the very murders they have been charged with solving.
The column went on from there, adding previously unknown stuff about the murders of Jimmy Cleary and Mark Upton — and stating clearly that the same people had tried to kill Danny O’Heran, and that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. It talked about why the three skinheads — two dead, and one missing — couldn’t have done any of the killings. And it linked the Aryan Nations’ wave of murder and crime to the Portland punk rock murders.
The piece ran some 1,500 words and would be broken up by my photos and line drawings. There was a detailed rendering I did of the Aryan Nations’ hooked cross, a photo of the New Hampshire sheriff’s cruiser at the remote acreage outside Exeter, and a shot of the protest outside the Portland courthouse.
Along with all of that, at X’s request, I had carefully — and very reluctantly — done up three official-looking India ink drawings of the scenes where Jimmy, Mark, and Danny had been found. Below Jimmy, the cutline was “Crucifixion.” Below Mark, it was “Martyrdom.” And, below Danny, it was “Baptism.” In this part, X wrote:
All of the killings (or attempted killings) of our friends were ritualistic and were the result of the killers’ insane, sick, twisted mind. And all the murders and attacks are connected to the killers’ counterfeit religion, which calls itself Christian Identity.
Laying out that edition of The NCNA was done late one afternoon in the Industrial Arts area in PAHS’s basement. Members of the paper’s staff, along with some Room 531 regulars, had kept watch to make sure that no teacher or member of the administration could see what we were doing. It was printed off on the presses at The Casco Bay, a kooky libertarian weekly that didn’t give a shit what The NCNA had to say, as long as we could pay. Which, after the success of the last Gary’s gig, X and I could.
We distributed The NCNA just outside the parking lots at PAHS and PHS, as usual, but with one key difference: X had suggested he, Patti, and I keep all the copies in the trunk of my car, and that I make certain to keep the engine running. Just as PAHS’s vice-principal came charging out the school’s front doors, a copy of The NCNA clutched in one hand, me and Patti understood why. “Time to split,” X said, and we did. “Things are about to get interesting.”
By the time the three of us pulled up at X’s house a few hours later, almost every copy of The NCNA had been passed out. His mother was waiting for us, really, really pissed off. “We’ve had repeated calls from that reporter at the Press Herald, Detective Savoie, Detective Chow, and a libel lawyer representing the Portland Police Association, X,” she said, flipping through the message slips. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
Yeah, he’s declaring war on the cops, Mrs. X. That’s what he’s doing.
We all watched as X collected the few remaining copies of The NCNA from the back of my car. “I do,” he said, seeming unfazed by his mother’s concerns. “I’m trying to provoke a reaction.”
And, holy shit, did he ever.
Mrs. X frowned when she saw the headline emblazoned across the front page. “NEO-NAZIS, MURDER, AND THE PORTLAND COPS WITH BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS,” it read.
“Dear God,” she said.
C H A P T E R 47
The benefit was for Rock Against Racism, the U.K.-based outfit that — like everyone else, pretty much — had heard about the murders and near-murders in Portland, Maine, and was greatly alarmed by the rumblings about
violent hate groups. By 1979, RAR had become the best-known anti-hate movement around. The fact that RAR was supporting some Portland punks was super important. It made a statement.
For the show, Gary’s dirty walls were covered with shiny, black and pink RAR banners and posters sent to Sister Betty and me by antiracist organizers in London. The cover charge was five bucks — pretty high, I guess, but everyone knew it was for a good cause. Anyone who attended got an RAR badge and a shot at winning one of the banners.
The local scene, bit by bit, was coming back. The Nasties’ record deal, the smell of spring in the air, the arrival of some exciting new acts (like the Golden Portlanders, and the Sandwiches) — plus the bloody end to two of the three neo-Nazi skins and the total disappearance of the third — had all combined to lessen some of the unease local punks had been feeling for months. So, when the RAR benefit was announced, hundreds of local kids wanted to attend. The show featured the Punk Rock Virgins as the headliner and the Mild Chaps as the opening act. The gig was billed as a “Punk Chicks and Chaps Night” by Sister Betty and me, mainly because we had organized most of it. X, meanwhile, had been suspended from school for the sin of publishing the cop-hating edition of The NCNA. He had refused to reveal to PAHS’s administration the names of anyone else who had been involved in putting it together, and so they sent him home for a few days, meaning he had plenty of time to help us out.
Nobody had sued him, because truth is a defense.
And everyone knew he was right.
The night of the show, Mike worked the door. The lineup to get into Gary’s snaked down Brown Street and well out onto Congress. With X acting as a roadie, Sister Betty and I had coordinated the equipment load-in, the PA, and all of the PR for the show.
Recipe for Hate Page 17