Law in War on Far-Right Sect : White Supremacists Tied to Western Crime Spree

Federal law enforcement officers are waging an intensive crackdown on a far-right-wing sect in the West that has been linked to nine months of violent crimes seemingly patterned after a 1978 novel in which white supremacists and tax protesters overthrow the government.

The 12-year-old group, known as the Aryan Nations or the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, has been tied to the murder of a controversial Denver talk-show host, a synagogue bombing in Idaho, shootouts with police in several states and two armored car robberies in California and Washington state.

In addition, the Secret Service has uncovered a full-scale printing operation for counterfeiting $20 and $100 bills, with presses as far apart as Philadelphia and the Pacific Northwest. Officials said the group has used the bogus bills, along with cash from robberies, to fund its activities.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating the sect’s acquisition of heavy weapons, including submachine guns and hand grenades, and the Internal Revenue Service is examining the activities of some heavily armed sect members on tax evasion charges.

According to John M. Walker Jr., chief of enforcement at the Treasury Department, the Aryans are “as violent as any group we’ve ever encountered.”

Pattern Proves Puzzling

The emerging pattern of violence linked to the Aryan Nations puzzles some authorities because the group was founded in 1973 in the peaceful Idaho community of Hayden Lake by avowed racist Richard Girnt Butler. It was not previously considered violent except for scattered incidents in which gun-toting members occasionally threatened lawmen.

But according to court documents and law enforcement officials, young militants have recently come to the fore in the group. They appear to be bent on implementing the plot of the neo-Nazi novel “Turner’s Diaries,” in which Jews, blacks and members of other minorities are slain and the government is overthrown.

The group, in addition to its racism, holds that the federal government’s power to tax deprives citizens of their basic rights, and that overthrow of the government may be achieved more easily if citizens withhold payment of federal income taxes.

Although the sect claims it has up to 8,000 members and readers of its literature, Assistant FBI Director William M. Baker says the FBI estimates the “hard-core” to be a cadre of 100 to 150 persons.

According to Wes McCune, executive director of Group Research Inc. of Washington, a nonprofit organization that monitors far-right activities, the Aryans are loosely allied with the Ku Klux Klan but generally are not as visible or as well-organized.

Baker said the Aryan Nations “derive members and concepts” from the former Idaho chapter of Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus, a militant tax-revolt group. Gordon Kahl, one of that group’s leaders, was killed in a 1983 shoot-out with authorities in Arkansas, more than a year after he killed a U.S. marshal and a deputy and wounded a police officer.

As a result, the Aryans have drawn special attention and expressions of concern from Stanley E. Morris, director of the U.S. Marshals Service, some of whose officers have been shot or assaulted as they attempted to serve court papers on extremist group members.

Morris said such groups “support issues that on the surface have a superficial appeal to many Americans, such as objecting to taxes and opposing heavy federal and state regulation.”

Paradoxically, he added, members “commit illegal acts but wrap themselves in the American flag, . . . assault the police but view themselves as religious and God-fearing . . . (and) talk of freedom but support virulent racial and religious bigotry.”

Authorities note that younger, more militant Aryan adherents have come to the fore in recent months, replacing the leadership of 61-year-old founder Butler, whose “violence” had been confined to his fiery, racist speeches.

McCune of Group Research Inc. says “church” members may be “feeling their oats” with the nation’s political atmosphere appearing to turn more conservative.

One young militant, Robert Jay Mathews, 31, died inside a burning farmhouse near Seattle on Dec. 8 in a shoot-out with federal officers attempting to arrest him on assault and weapons violation charges. The house caught fire when an FBI SWAT team fired a nighttime illumination flare that accidentally hit the frame building, in which Mathews had stored explosives.

Mathews, who had left the Aryan church to form an affiliated group called the White Aryan Bastion, was recently termed a “hero” of the sect by founder Butler.

In a federal court affidavit, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle said that before his death, Mathews invited a few associates to join what he called “The Order.” That is the name of a paramilitary underground group in “Turner’s Diaries,” written by acknowledged racist William Pierce of Arlington, Va.

Some activities of Mathews and his followers closely paralleled events in the novel, officials say, and court papers indicate that Mathews recommended the book to his associates. The book describes pitched battles with law enforcement officers and the use of robberies and counterfeiting to fund a white supremacist organization.

Since Mathews’ death, Gary Lee Yarbrough, 29, a close associate of Mathews and former bodyguard of Butler, has been arrested on charges of assaulting federal officers in connection with an armored car holdup last April in Seattle.

A search of his Idaho home led authorities to consider him a prime suspect in the slaying of Alan Berg, a Jewish talk-show host who had publicly belittled extremist groups. Berg was gunned down outside his Denver town house in June. The search turned up a cache of weapons ranging from an Uzi submachine gun and loaded crossbows to a “Mac-10” automatic pistol--the weapon used to kill Berg.

Yarbrough has denied any role in the slaying.

Related searches of other homes of Aryan Nations-linked defendants have turned up four crossbows, booby-traps, infrared night-vision scopes, 100 sticks of dynamite, three-quarters of a pound of C-4 explosives along with detonating wire, two .45-caliber semi-automatic weapons (one equipped with a silencer), a Mini-14 Ruger .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle, a bandoleer of buckshot shotgun shells and a hand grenade.

According to the FBI’s Baker, Aryan members or sympathizers also have been linked to an armored car holdup last July in Ukiah, Calif. It and the Seattle robbery were conducted “to fund further criminal acts by members or offshoots of the Aryan Nations,” he said.

Robert E. Merki and his wife, Sharon, are to be tried next month in Seattle on charges they organized the ring. In all, the FBI has arrested 11 suspects in connection with the armored car heists, for harboring Mathews and for assaulting federal officers. Two suspected armored-car bandits, Andrew Virgil Barnhill and Richard Harold Kemp, were taken into custody earlier this month while playing poker in a bar in Kalispell, Mont.

Baker said sect members also are under suspicion in the April 29, 1984, fire-bombing of a synagogue in Boise, Ida.