FBI Set Sights on Crippled White Supremacist Hero : Inquiry: Informants befriended wheelchair-bound, poverty-stricken O.C. man to gain access to hate groups.

When FBI informants set out in 1991 to infiltrate white supremacy hate groups in Orange County, they were pointed in the direction of a 20-year-old crippled man who needed a strap to hold him upright in his wheelchair.

Geremy C. Von Rineman had become a fallen hero for the White Aryan movement after a bloody confrontation with suspected minority gang members in Van Nuys that left him paralyzed from the neck down in 1989.

While the bullet that felled him also elevated him to near-martyrdom among fellow skinheads, and cemented his activism with the white supremacist movement, being disabled plunged him into near poverty. He was supported only by a state welfare check, and his relationship was becoming strained with his companion and caretaker, Jill Marie Scarborough.

It was in this desperate state of need, his friends now say, that two FBI informants found Rineman at his Fullerton apartment in September, 1991.

During that initial encounter, one informant pulled out a wad of bills, according to a friend who claims to have unknowingly led the undercover informants to Rineman.

“It looks to me like you need a little bit of help,” one of the informants is remembered to have said as he handed over about $350 to $500. Before the evening was over, the new acquaintance would offer to buy a van to help transport Rineman in his wheelchair.

Rineman and his friends would worry much later that the two men were not seeking his friendship but rather information to build cases for the FBI against white hate groups.

His worst suspicions were confirmed July 15 when federal agents charged Rineman, 22, and Scarborough, 21--the couple is now separated--with possession of an illegal short-barreled shotgun.

Six other white supremacists from Orange and Los Angeles counties also were arrested on weapons and other charges. Two juveniles and an adult were part of the Fourth Reich Skinheads, which authorities say plotted to commit violence against racial and religious minorities.

The Rineman episode shows how law enforcement agents get inside secret groups that are suspected of illegal activities, often by befriending vulnerable members. At the same time, it is becoming a rallying point for white supremacists who charge that authorities have manufactured the cases.

Federal officials have said videotape and other evidence will show there was no entrapment.

Though Rineman could not be reached for an interview, friends and family members describe him as a nonviolent skinhead and they ridicule the charges.

“How can a man who cannot pick up a fork to eat and cannot take care of himself in any way because his fingers are closed into a fist--how can he pick up a gun?” asked one relative who did not want to be identified.

If Rineman was becoming a political radical while he attended Marina High School in Huntington Beach, his relatives did not know it. He was a skinhead, but they believed it connoted nothing more than the style in which he and his friends wore their hair and the kind of music they loved.

Rineman grew up in Huntington Beach and lived with his grandparents for two years so that he could attend Marina High School instead of Huntington Beach High School.

With better than a B grade average, he was one of many seniors in the class of ’89 presented with an academic citation bearing President Bush’s signature. Instead of going to college, he took a job as an apprentice machinist at McDonnell Douglas.

Friends do not clearly remember when Rineman met Scarborough--a lanky woman with prominent bone features who reminded them of actress Shelley Duvall. Scarborough also couldn’t be contacted for an interview.

By the night of Oct. 14, 1989, just a few months after his high school graduation, Rineman was ready to marry Scarborough and begin a new life with her and her infant son.

But his life changed that evening.

About 50 skinheads had gathered in Van Nuys for a birthday celebration. Part of the entertainment included a viewing of two “Aryan weddings” videotaped the previous summer by members of the White Aryan Resistance during an “Aryan Fest” near Tulsa, Okla.

Inspired by the weddings, Rineman proposed to Scarborough during the party, and the cause for celebration grew.

But throughout the evening, party-goers engaged in shouting matches with suspected neighborhood gang members at a nearby Lucky’s supermarket. The evening ended in violence when Rineman and two other skinheads went to the store, and Rineman was shot.

Rineman was initially treated in a county hospital ward filled with minority shooting victims and “felt totally defenseless being a skinhead,” said John Metzger, son of Tom Metzger, founder of the Fallbrook-based White Aryan Resistance.

Before the shooting, the Metzgers did not know Rineman, nor had he been an active member of WAR. But the incident brought them together and cemented Rineman’s activism in the white supremacist movement.

Two weeks after the shooting, he was moved to Northridge Hospital where, his tattooed body in traction and a metal halo screwed to his head, Rineman was interviewed by Tom Metzger for WAR’s cable television program.

In the tape, Metzger sounded a reveille for the movement, calling Rineman’s shooting a “typical anti-white attack by non-whites who feel that they own the streets.”

Rineman has also been featured in WAR newsletters, which carried pleas for financial help. Like a war hero, he was decorated with a WAR medallion inscribed: “If you should fall my friend another friend will emerge from the shadows to take your place.”

In July, 1990, the summer after the shooting, friends raised money to send Rineman and Scarborough to the “Aryan Fest” in Oklahoma, where they had a non-legally binding “Aryan wedding,” John Metzger said.

“I think he was kind of a focal point, a new figure that a lot of skinheads could look toward,” Metzger said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he went back to the Aryan Fest where he got married. A lot of guys wanted to meet him.”

A friend of the couple’s who is not a skinhead, Lewis M. Kallas of Santa Ana, said he saw a videotape of the Rineman-Scarborough wedding ceremony, which included a ritual burning of a cross.

The couple, Kallas said, “just talked about when the race war was going to come. . . . There was no specific time. What they used to tell me was that they would be dead before the race war would come.”

Neighbors in Fullerton said they remember the couple listening to music containing racist lyrics, and that their arms were covered with white supremacist tattoos.

During that time, Rineman also became a member of the Church of the Creator, a Florida-based white supremacist group.

By the next summer, however, support from the skinhead community was fading, John Metzger said. Whenever he visited their house, John Metzger would check the refrigerator, but would find only potatoes and other bare necessities.

It was about that time that the two informants turned up.

A Los Angeles-area white supremacist, a friend of Rineman’s, recently told John Metzger in a taped conversation that in September, 1991, he was approached by two men offering funding for the movement. The friend said he suggested that Rineman needed assistance.

One of the men, known as Rev. Joe Allen with the Church of the Creator, bought Rineman an old van that was useless and had to be towed away. The second man, known as “Roger,” would drop by with groceries and money to help pay the rent, Rineman’s friend stated on the tape to Metzger.

Neither informant is named in law enforcement documents stating the charges against Rineman and Scarborough. But both are described in the affidavit as having extensive experience in FBI undercover operations and having developed the cases against others charged earlier this month in the unrelated cases. Also, sources have confirmed that Allen is the man described in the affidavit as “Confidential Informant 1.”

Two months after first meeting Rineman and Scarborough, the federal informants went to their apartment and allegedly were shown a revolver and a short-barreled shotgun. The couple acknowledged they knew the shotgun was illegal and that’s why they kept it hidden, according to the affidavit.

The informants took the shotgun, promising to have it repaired. Later, they told Scarborough that one of the informants had been arrested for possessing the shotgun and it was confiscated. According to the federal complaint, they paid the couple $400 for the weapon.

In his defense, Rineman’s friends now say the gun was not his; it had been left there by a friend and Scarborough had given it to the informants to get rid of it.

Several weeks after allegedly accepting payment for the weapon in February, 1992, Rineman and Scarborough broke up.

Rineman’s relationship with Allen and with the Church of the Creator also disintegrated, mostly because Rineman began suspecting Allen was an infiltrator, friends said.

In a June 10, 1993, letter that was reprinted in the group’s newsletter, Allen defended himself against Rineman’s charges, described Rineman as a “spoiled brat,” and one “who has never accomplished anything for the white race except getting himself shot and paralyzed.”

Allen has not surfaced since the arrests were made in mid-July and could not comment.

Ironically, Rineman’s being charged in the case has again made him a rallying point for skinheads and white supremacists; and he is attracting their moral support.

“Are they going to arrest him for his beliefs?” asked one member who did not want his name used. From his parents’ home in Riverside County, Rineman keeps in touch with fellow skinheads by telephone, using a speaker set up and a headset.

Among those who has given him advice in recent days is Tom Metzger, a veteran of many legal battles: “I said, ‘I sure hope you fight them all the way on this and make them go to a jury trial and make them prove it.’ ”

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this report.

* WEAPONS SOURCE? A couple from Saugus is being investigated. A3