Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family

by Jess Walter

  Everywhere, groups of white men stood around, talking about where The Order had gone wrong. Some said they had gotten too violent too fast; others suggested they had wasted too much time robbing armored cars and printing up phony tens. Randy milled about, meeting all sorts of people, like Rod Willey, a computer technician who’d joined the Aryan Nations four or five years earlier. Kumnick introduced the two, and Randy told Willey he was there “to observe the goings-on and learn about the Aryan philosophy.”

  Despite the crushing defeat of The Order, the Aryans at the 1986 world congress weren’t backing down. The last member of the group captured, security officer Richard Scutari, wrote from prison: “I offer no apologies, except for having failed to meet our goals. Learn from our mistakes and succeed where we failed. The Bruders Schweigen has shown you the way.” It served as the unofficial motto for the weekend.

  Dozens of people bought $7 medallions that promised: “Should you fall my friend, another friend will emerge from the shadows to take your place.”

  People milled about the congress, eating $1 “hamburgs,” listening to the speakers, or checking out the bookstore (“Nazi Polar Experiments—$5.95”). Many people wore camouflage and holstered handguns strapped to their waists. Several KKK members wore black robes, others wore Confederate flags, and one young man wore a black concert T-shirt that announced “Adolf Hitler World Tour, 1939–1945.” After skipping the event in 1985, the Aryans even had an old-fashioned cross burning, which they tastefully called a cross “lighting,” torching a fifteen-foot cross in the woods near Hayden Lake and praying around it.

  The congress made a special outreach toward families and children. The pastor Robert Miles, wearing a hooded black robe, told fourteen young boys they’d be good night riders for the KKK. The Klan started for fun, Miles said. “They took their pillowcases and sheets and painted all kinds of designs on them.” A sign on a nearby wall showed an Uncle Sam figure and was labeled “Aryan Sam sez: I WANT YOU … Join in support ARYAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS.”

  But the ease with which The Order had been broken and its members convinced to turn against the others chilled everyone. All weekend, the congressgoers watched each other suspiciously, wrote down license plate numbers, and were careful about what they said and to whom they said it. The public address announcer cautioned: “It is likely there are federal informants and agents among us.”

  SIX

  AT 11:15 ON THE COLD, BLUE MORNING of January 20, 1987, a barrel-shaped motorcycle gang member named Gustav Antony Magisono—Gus to his friends—let out a small burp as he stepped out of his red Nissan Sentra and walked across a small, grassy park in downtown Sandpoint. It was a typical winter day in North Idaho, where the wind careens off the deep-water lakes and is channeled up granite valleys until it has built up enough icy speed to slam every screen door this side of Canada. The sky was clear, and the ground frosted with a light snow as Gus looked for Frank Kumnick, the guy he was supposed to meet at a small park behind a downtown motel. Subaru station wagons with ski racks maneuvered the snow-lined streets of Sandpoint, stragglers from a winter carnival that had taken place that weekend on nearby Schweitzer Basin’s seventy-eight inches of packed powder. Magisono couldn’t care less about skiing. He was in Sandpoint on serious and hopefully illegal business. He was a biker in his early forties, just under six feet tall, round and balding, with a gray beard and a cocksure way of talking about himself that made it clear: He knew the right people. A weapons dealer and security expert from the East Coast, Magisono had gotten involved with motorcycle gangs and found he agreed with their white supremacist views. The summer before, he’d even gone to the Aryan Nations’ summer conference, where he listened to the incredible list of speakers and hooked up with a few guys who believed the way he did. Now he was finding himself drawn into the movement and taking the next step, trying to get involved in a group that would carry on the work of The Order and The Order II.

  That’s where Frank Kumnick fit in. Magisono had talked on the phone with Frank, who said they ought to meet to go over some important business. Magisono had known Kumnick only a short time, but he seemed to be a player, and he talked of having some ambitious plans. Magisono stood in the park alone, wondering where Kumnick was. Just then, an old Jeep Wagoneer pulled up, and Kumnick leaned out and waved at him. When the Jeep stopped, Kumnick got out of the passenger seat, moved to the back, and Magisono took his place up front. In the driver’s seat was a guy he remembered meeting at last July’s Aryan Nations Congress, a thin, friendly guy with intense eyes and a midwestern accent, Randy Weaver. Kumnick was a couple of inches and thirty pounds bigger than Weaver, who was jumpy, with darting eyes. Magisono hadn’t expected to see Randy here, and right away he wondered what was happening. Since the summer congress, Magisono had had some dealings with Kumnick but none with this other guy, and all three men were wary of each other because it was just so damn easy to get caught up with a snitch these days.

  From the backseat, Kumnick leaned forward, not quite as friendly as before. “How are you?” He asked if Magisono remembered Randy Weaver.

  Magisono looked over at Weaver. “Hey, guy, how are you?”

  “Pretty good.”

  Magisono turned around and talked with Kumnick some more, but Weaver seemed quiet and nervous, and so he turned to him again. “How you been, stranger?” He was beginning to feel comfortable with Kumnick, but he still wasn’t sure what Weaver was doing here. For the things they were going to talk about, Magisono knew trust was the key on all sides.

  “Didn’t you celebrate Martin Luther Coon day?” Kumnick asked.

  “I took a big piss for him,” Magisono said. He complained about the King celebration in Spokane the day before, with its parade and civil rights speeches. Hell, even the governor had come to Spokane, to make a symbolic statement about the Aryans just over the state line. The others agreed it was a bullshit holiday.

  “Yeah,” Weaver said. “This country has got its priorities just really screwed up. Yeah. Celebrate a communist, sex-pervert nigger. Son of a bitch.”

  They all laughed.

  They considered talking at the restaurant in Connies Motor Inn, but Kumnick didn’t want to because it was so crowded. Magisono suggested driving down to the Edgewater, a hotel on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, talking in its coffee shop and then going for a stroll through the big city park there.

  Weaver drove along Sandpoint’s square of one-way streets, past antiques stores, specialty shops, and restaurants, and across Bridge Street and the wide, shallow Sand Creek, into the parking lot of the Edgewater, a two-story resort at the northwest corner of the lake, sidesaddle to the round, sandy point for which the town was named. Magisono got right to business. He wanted to get involved in something big; he wanted to be around guys who could make something happen. “Are you ready to get things … ah … rolling?”

  Kumnick said yeah. Weaver said nothing. Kumnick and Magisono talked some more about the dangers of getting an organization together. Especially in light of what had happened with The Order I and II. Kumnick seemed spooked by something.

  “Gotta question for ya,” Kumnick said as they waited in the Wagoneer. “Can you stand an electric scan?”

  Magisono was surprised. “An electric scan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve gotten really careful,” Kumnick said. He said the scanner would tell him if Magisono was carrying a gun or was wired with a transmitter or tape recorder. “As small as a pin, it will pick it up.”

  Weaver contributed, “If you’re figuring out lately, everybody’s falling for one reason.”

  They thought he was a snitch? Magisono wondered if they were trying to scare him, but, in a way, he understood. Hell, he was just as careful in his business dealings. “Boy there’s a lot of shit going on, I’ll tell you that,” Magisono said. “It’s made me real, real cautious.”

  Kumnick wanted to talk about the electronic scanner some more, but he didn’t pull it out
yet. “I picked it up at an auction for a dollar. The same thing in a security place will cost you a hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

  After a few minutes, they walked into the Beach House, the restaurant adjacent to the Edgewater. Just ahead of the Tuesday lunch business, they got a table with a view of dark Lake Pend Oreille, where the January wind was lifting whitecaps onto the soft sand beach. The big biker excused himself and walked down the carpeted hall to the bathroom. Inside, he locked the door and, trying to remain calm, said into the tiny transmitter draped over his shoulder and taped to his chest, “He wants to do a scan on me!”

  THERE WAS NO Gus Magisono. It was a cover dreamed up by Kenneth Fadeley, a thirty-nine-year-old private investigator from Spokane. He’d worked in marketing for STP—the gasoline additive—before getting into the business of confidential informing in 1983, when a friend who happened to be a Spokane cop was killed during an investigation of motorcycle gangs. “I took it pretty personal,” Fadeley said. Unlike most informants, Fadeley didn’t have a criminal record and only did it because of his friend, because of the excitement and because of the little money he made. He also found that his personality was suited to undercover work, to adopting a new identity and rooting out criminals.

  Working for a few hundred dollars here and there, he posed as a bank executive to stop a rash of robberies in Spokane and staked out stores that had been hit by repeated burglaries. Once, as Fadeley was watching Johnny Carson on television in the back of an appliance store, he heard a noise and confronted the burglars in the back of the building. One of them raised a metal bar, and Fadeley shot and wounded him. A few weeks later, he helped track down a guy who had robbed a bank with a hand grenade.

  But he was at his best infiltrating the Aryan Nations. In 1984, while investigating a church that was stockpiling automatic rifles, Fadeley met a Georgia-friendly agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms named Herb Byerly. Two years later, with federal law enforcement worried again about white supremacists in Idaho, Byerly had talked the informant into attending the 1986 world congress, the first one since The Order trial, which had decimated the ranks of the violent young bucks in the white supremacist movement. The 1986 congress was to be the radical right’s signal that it wasn’t going away. At the Aryans’ Hayden Lake compound, Fadeley talked with survivalists, white separatists, constitutionalists, the entire spectrum of far-right activists, even knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He jotted down license plates and met men who would later be arrested for a spree of bombings in the Northwest.

  Fadeley’s assignment that weekend was to listen to the leaders who spoke and to gather intelligence about what they might be planning. He was also to get to know the radical right wingers at the conference, and so Fadeley introduced himself to a friendly guy who said his name was Frank Kumnick. They were walking across the grounds when Kumnick pointed out a smallish guy standing near a group of Ku Klux Klan members.

  “Hey, there’s Randy,” Kumnick said. “Come on over, I want you to meet an individual who will always cover your backside.” Kumnick introduced the two and told Fadeley that Weaver had been in Special Forces and was a really good guy. Weaver didn’t seem involved in anything, and so Fadeley didn’t think about him anymore. But Kumnick continued talking a big game, and after the Aryan Nations Congress, the ATF agents told Fadeley to continue getting close to him.

  A month later, Fadeley and Kumnick hiked up a wooded peak called Katka Mountain, near the Canadian border. There, they talked about raising money for a white uprising by kidnapping kids from the exclusive private school where Kumnick worked. The Rocky Mountain Academy was a boarding school where tuition could be as high as $3,500 a month. Filled with disciplined teachers and administrators, it catered to East and West Coast wealth, and at times housed heirs to the Du Pont and Howard Hughes fortunes. Rocky Mountain offered a place for successful people to send their kids, some of them to get them away from drugs, bad friends and relationships, or sometimes just the city. In the woods, they dried out, chilled out, and—the theory went—couldn’t find trouble even if you spotted them a convertible and $1,000.

  Kumnick later wrote that the plot to kidnap children from Rocky was all Fadeley’s idea, a trick to entrap him. “When I asked why, he said ‘for money,’” Kumnick said. He said he was suspicious of “Gus Magisono” immediately and knew he was being set up. He said he only talked about that plot and the others to shine Fadeley on and to see if Fadeley slipped up.

  But Fadeley insisted Kumnick was serious about kidnapping the children. “He told me Barbara Walters’s kid was there. He told me that Clint Eastwood’s kid was there,” Fadeley said later. “They were going to target the Jewish kids and anybody that was well known.” According to Fadeley, Kumnick wanted to use the money they got from the kidnapping scheme to finance terrorism, and he was especially interested in Jacqueline Guber, Walters’s daughter, who attended the school in the 1980s.

  Fadeley said Kumnick wanted to hide the children on Katka Mountain while they waited for the ransom money. He also said that Kumnick planned to bury food, water, weapons, and other supplies at the base of some trees on the mountain before the kidnapping. They would find the supplies by using key chains that beep at the sound of clapping hands. But Kumnick later denied the whole scheme.

  Fadeley was afraid Kumnick was serious, and so he told Byerly in the fall of 1986 and Byerly called some FBI agents in Spokane, who then called the school. Kumnick was fired a few weeks later by school officials who said his van had been seen at an Aryan Nations gathering.

  Hopeful that his cover was still good, Fadeley requested another meeting with Kumnick, so they could talk about forming a group to further the white cause, to continue the work of the Bruders Schweigen. But now, in Sandpoint, Kumnick had brought Randy Weaver and was threatening to run an electronic scan on him. Fadeley figured that Byerly was nearby, perhaps a block away, in an unmarked, gold Dodge Diplomat and hopefully he understood how much danger his undercover informant was in. Fadeley knew Kumnick was a big talker, and he suspected he’d brought Weaver along to impress him with the fact that he had at least one colleague. He also knew that if he was going to find out what kind of crimes Kumnick, and possibly Weaver, might be capable of committing, he just had to go along with Kumnick and hope his cover stayed solid. And if things went bad, he sure as hell hoped Byerly wasn’t far away.

  “I WAS ABOUT TO BUST a kidney,” Fadeley told the men when he rejoined them at the table. They made small talk and ordered three cups of coffee. Randy was quiet in the restaurant while Kumnick and Fadeley—the man they still believed was Gus Magisono—talked about how difficult it was to find anyone to trust. Federal informants were everywhere. Fadeley knew a few other guys who could help them with the group they wanted to form, four ex-military guys that he’d checked out himself. Of course, they would need weapons. Randy was still distant, still wasn’t talking much about their plans, so when Kumnick excused himself to go to the bathroom, Fadeley tried again. This team they were trying to form would never work if they couldn’t build trust in one another.

  “We don’t know each other at all,” Weaver said.

  “No.”

  Always friendly, Randy offered a little bit of information about himself. “I base everything I believe on the Bible,” he said.

  Fadeley said he was raised Catholic but wasn’t practicing anymore, that he trusted his values and was loyal to people like Kumnick. The conversation turned to what they believed.

  “Your kids go to public school?” Randy asked.

  “You bet.”

  “The Bible says don’t take your hate out on your kids, but raise them up,” Weaver said. “So when you send them to school, you are giving up your responsibility.”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Fadeley said.

  “I’m just telling you things I read and study.” Randy wasn’t trying to preach, but people should know why they believe what they do. “And when the time comes, it’s not my responsibility to sha
re brotherly love and my food that I save for my kids with your kids because you didn’t … And it’s comin’ down … It’s goin’ down the tubes. And you’d better be prepared to survive. Pray that you be counted worthy.”

  Kumnick came back to the table for the end of the sermon he’d heard several times from Randy and Vicki Weaver. The talk switched to organization, to forming a group, and again, Randy just sat there, quiet. Kumnick was worried still. These other guys that the biker knew, they didn’t know Weaver and Kumnick’s last names, did they? Because that could be unwise. No, Fadeley said.

  They paid for their coffees and walked out to the Wagoneer again, Weaver in the driver’s seat, Fadeley next to him, and Kumnick in back. Randy drove across the parking lot to City Park, a rounded, three-block point of grass and beach that was the tourist center of town during the summer. But on such raw winter days, the park was empty and Randy maneuvered the Jeep to the end of the lot. Here, even though they were smack in the middle of downtown, no one could see them.

  Fadeley was becoming nervous, and he suggested they go for a walk.

  “You know what sounds like a winner to me?” Weaver said. “It’s nice and warm in here. I’m gonna stay right in here.”

  “That’s fine,” Fadeley said, wondering how far away Byerly was.

  “I ain’t got all that blubber on me like you guys do.” Weaver laughed.

  Fadeley laughed uncomfortably. In the backseat, Kumnick pulled out his electronic scanner, a black gizmo that fit nicely in his thick palm.

  Fadeley sat with his left arm draped over the Jeep’s bench seat and Kumnick swept the device over Fadeley’s arm, stopping just inches away from the wire that ran over his chest. With his right hand, hidden from Kumnick and Weaver, Fadeley fingered the .22-caliber pistol holstered on his ankle. His hand strained to wrap around the handle, but he realized he wouldn’t be able to get the Velcro strap off the gun in time. He was screwed.