Nichols Brothers Swept Up in Dark Maelstrom of Fury : Militias: Blast probe figures long raged at government. Officials wonder whether they moved beyond mere words.

They consider themselves apostles of liberty, but for the last six weeks Terry and James Nichols have been prisoners of a government they do not recognize.

Terry Lynn Nichols, a 40-year-old with a bank teller’s countenance, is confined to an isolation cell in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma. His death may be sought by authorities he believes have seized unlawful power. When he appears in court, Nichols shuffles like a windup toy, hobbled by iron shackles.

His brother, James Douglas Nichols, bearded and balding with an intense blue-eyed gaze, won a measure of freedom last week with his release from federal custody in Detroit. But the 41-year-old man who once railed about government restrictions remains tethered to an electronic bracelet, his daily movements limited by a judge’s order.

The Nichols brothers became targets of federal investigators through their friendship with Timothy J. McVeigh, who officials say rented the Ryder truck that delivered the bomb that took at least 167 lives at the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19.

Their relationship, a coming together that unleashed a powerful political synergy, is at the heart of the probe of the bombing. Primed by personal disappointments and a growing suspicion toward government agencies, McVeigh and Terry Nichols--close friends from the Army--and brother James each moved separately toward the same dark maelstrom. Their ideological education cut a wide swath across the landscape of the American ultra-right, charting a back-country movement gripped with fear and anger, increasingly preoccupied with the idea of violent revolution.

From the late summer of 1993 and into the winter, the trio lived together here, honing their ability to make common farm materials explode. They attended organizational meetings of the Michigan Militia Corps, then rejected and were rejected by the local militia brigade.

By 1994, they had decided to form their own smaller, more secretive and radical cell.

All three, informants told investigators, warned the others that they must limit themselves to six or eight people to guard against infiltrators. McVeigh was the one who buttonholed new recruits. The Nichols brothers were the ones who received his assessments of trustworthiness. They called themselves the Patriots, but told outsiders they belonged to the Militia.

About every other week that winter, the self-styled Patriots took to the woods in subzero temperatures, firing hunting rifles at targets among the aspen, big-tooth spruce, willow and tag alder near Minden City. Sometimes they camped overnight on the frozen ground.

Their name was the same as that of a survivalist offshoot of the tax-resistant and violence-prone Posse Comitatus. James Nichols knew this well, having traveled to meetings of the Patriots in the town of Mt. Pleasant, about a two-hour drive to the west. Once he even brought two carloads of friends.

“We’re nationwide, we’re getting bigger,” James Nichols said of the Patriots one day as he sat on a neighbor’s front porch nursing a beer. When their ranks swelled enough, Randy Izydorek recalls him boasting, the Patriots would “start at the local level, killing cops, judges and lawyers, and move on from there.” The remark stung Izydorek’s cousin, Andy, who was also present. He was planning to become a police officer.

Federal investigators are now examining the links among various Patriot branches in Michigan and elsewhere, including Kingman, Ariz., where McVeigh spent much of the last two years.

Did they move beyond talk? Many of the Nichols brothers’ family and friends say no, that the two were caring neighbors and fathers incapable of such violence. The brothers “knew the wrong guy,” said their father, Robert W. Nichols.

Terry Nichols’ ex-wife, Lana Padilla, who has maintained close relations, says he “wouldn’t hurt a soul. He is the most gentle, kind person.” Yet she cannot explain a letter he asked her to give to McVeigh if he died, a note that she opened instead. “You’re on your own,” it read in part. “Go for it!”

Michael Fortier, who has told authorities he traveled to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with McVeigh days before the blast, has identified Terry Nichols to investigators as the assigned mixer of crucial bomb ingredients. Fortier served in the Army with both McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

James Nichols himself called the bombing “a bad tragedy” after he was freed on $5,000 bond Tuesday; his first words to a friend he phoned from jail were, “I’m innocent.”

Although Terry is now formally accused in the bombing, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are still plumbing his brother’s potential role. They are investigating whether James helped plan the scheme. They are not certain if he even knew about it beforehand. They jailed him on other explosives charges, in part to pressure him into cooperating. A friend, Philip Morawski, calls the efforts “guilt by association.”

The brothers shared a tumultuous coming of age--their mother once aimed a chain saw at a police officer, and the family’s rural prosperity vanished after their parents’ acrimonious divorce. Later, they married sisters. Each fathered a son and each divorced as well.

Terry, the quiet man who could not find his calling, started out as a financial survivalist, hoarding silver and gold.

James, the headstrong farmer who poured molasses on his fields for nutrients and put drops of hydrogen peroxide in his milk for his health, grew alienated from a legal system that he cast as a tormentor when his estranged wife accused him of sexually abusing their son.

From Michigan to Kansas to Nevada, from organic farming to gun shows, from the Army to the Patriots, the brothers formed their vision of a more perfect union, slowly cutting themselves off from a bureaucratic society they grew to passionately hate.

The Nichols ideology was familiar in their home base, the “thumb”--a conservative agricultural region nicknamed for its position on Michigan’s mitten-shaped map. Mutterings about federal incompetence and interference draw no more notice than the dust and gravel kicked up by vehicles on unpaved country roads. “We all feel this way, that the government has got their nose in too far,” said K.J. (Bud) Innes, who sells mobile homes along the main highway, Michigan 53.

But the brothers escalated a notch, moving into civil disobedience. Terry created his own homemade check to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in bills, contending it was as valid as government currency. James was caught driving without a valid license, arguing he didn’t need one because he had a constitutional right to travel freely.

But the Nichols brothers and McVeigh, officials allege, merged in the shared belief that only decisive action could thwart the hated government. Terry Nichols and McVeigh are now charged with carrying it out.

*

A white, five-bedroom house with a colonnaded porch has been home to James Nichols for more than a decade. He manages 600 acres--160 owned and the rest leased--for his mother, who lives in another county to the south.

Terry lived and farmed there too, but chafed under James’ direction. Never satisfied long with any of his jobs, Terry moved in and out of state, yo-yoing among various homes in Michigan and Kansas, Nevada and the Philippines.

The Decker place was crowded in the summer of 1993. James told friends he was a little annoyed. A notably fastidious man, he was already sharing his quarters with Terry and his family--second wife, Marife, toddler stepson Jason and a new baby, Nicole, as well as an older son, Joshua, from Terry’s first marriage.

Then Terry’s Army friend showed up. He was a lean, flint-faced man who carried himself straight as a bayonet blade--although he’d left the service two years before. McVeigh tried to help around the farm. But unlike Terry, who could plow, haul produce and tackle any farm chore, McVeigh was inept with machinery and tools.

McVeigh often carried a gun in his belt and had little to say to outsiders, James Nichols’ intimates recalled--except when the subject of Waco came up. The federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, the subsequent siege and its fiery end--on April 19, 1993--with more than 80 cult members dead, enraged McVeigh.

His host shared his fury. “I’ve never seen him madder than when he talks about Waco,” Randy Izydorek said of James Nichols.

That summer, the two brothers and McVeigh started experimenting on the farm with various kinds of bottle bombs. This was no great secret: Another worker, Kevin Nicholas, reportedly witnessed the blasts. So did Daniel Stomber, who ran the chicken farm next door. “I watched them mix peroxide and chromium in a cellophane bag,” Morawski said. “The peroxide would eat up the bag and it would go boom. They’d use brake fluid and chlorine; they’d get different flames and pops.”

James, it seemed, had an abiding curiosity about all sorts of things--and often followed through, Morawski said, to see what would happen. Once Nichols wondered if taking a bath in copper sulfate might improve his health. He prepared a tubful, then decided against immersing himself--only after he stuck his hand in and it turned green.

But to some, the makeshift proving grounds carried ominous overtones. At least one local resident complained to the Sanilac County Sheriff’s Department that the brothers and their friend graduated to more powerful pipe bombs. At a May 2 detention hearing for James Nichols, an FBI bomb specialist testified that metal fragments, thicker than garbage cans, found on the farm “were the effects of an explosive detonation.”

By fall, the trio was, by several accounts, attending meetings of the Michigan Militia Corps brigade that was organizing locally. McVeigh sat silently, informants told investigators, but the Nichols brothers preached action, insisting that violence would be inevitable one day. Their talk was always general, but both kept pressing the point.

Even after the brothers started their own group, James urged the Militia to action. Last January, he showed up at its regular Wednesday night meeting at the Holbrook Church near Minden City. As members sipped coffee and ate cookies, James urged a militant withdrawal from contact with government.

“He said: ‘Throw out your Social Security cards, quit paying taxes,’ ” recalled militiaman John Simpson. Most in the audience were unimpressed, even though they shared his anti-government anger. “We still thought we had to work within the system to change things. He had his opinion and we had ours.”

In early 1994, the Nichols brothers and McVeigh followed their own course, preparing for what they saw as the impending revolution. James Nichols was the moving force behind this new group of the Patriots, informants have told law enforcement officials.

Mostly, they studied in private. “There are people who travel the circuits up here; they give information away in meetings at farmhouses,” said one Nichols friend who spoke on condition of anonymity. “None of these people have big organizations, but little by little they become influences. It’s like salvation; people want to share the gospel.”

Terry Nichols joined in but was embroiled in personal turmoil. On Nov. 22, about 7 a.m., little Jason climbed out of his crib and into some packing boxes where someone had left a plastic bag. Within minutes, the child suffocated. McVeigh, who often played with Jason, tried cardiopulmonary resuscitation. His efforts failed.

By early 1994, the Patriots reached a new phase, practicing their shooting under the watchful eye of a former military man from Minden City. Nervous neighbors called the sheriff, only to be told that if the guns were legal, so were the drills.

Rumors spread that the small group was training with semiautomatics and perhaps even a .50-caliber machine gun. But local authorities never found any evidence of that.

*

The Nichols brothers’ ideological transformation unfolded over years, accelerating as their personal lives frayed.

But there was a time early in their lives when the system seemed to work just fine. Robert Nichols farmed 1,600 acres in Lapeer County--one of the largest rented properties in the state--and he always bought the best tractors, complete with air conditioning and cassette players. Whenever Terry or James, or their older brother, Les, or younger sister, Suzanne, wanted new clothing, they just went into a store and charged the purchase to their mother. The family went skiing. The boys had go-carts and guns.

Then came the divorce, a bitter affair. The Nicholses’ mother, Joyce, was drinking heavily, recalled Bill Dougherty Sr., the former Lapeer police chief. He pulled her over once and, while going to his squad car to answer the radio, he saw her tossing empty beer bottles into a cornfield. Then “I heard this whir,” Dougherty remembered, “and she was trying to get her chain saw going. . . . She throwed it at me.”

Joyce Nichols bought a farm up in Sanilac County, near Decker. Terry’s childhood dream of being a doctor dissipated when she called him back from his studies at Central Michigan University to help out in the fields, Robert Nichols said.

Then came the floods. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mud turned fields all over the thumb into graveyards for crops and equipment that still had payments due. Government disaster relief didn’t come close to covering expenses. The subject remained a touchy one with James: He complained about inadequate government aid this year when locals met with Michigan state legislator Kim Rhead.

Still, their lives progressed. Terry Nichols closed a deal on 120 acres in March of 1980. His real estate agent was a divorced mother, Lana Osentoski. They soon married. In 1984, James married Lana’s younger sister, Kelly Walsh.

A resourceful couple, Terry and Lana bought houses around the county, fixed them up and rented them out.

Terry baked his own bread and gave 50 pounds of organic wheat and a stone grinder to friends Sandy and Robert Papovich so that they could too. He presented his friends with freeze-dried meals: beef in mushroom-yogurt sauce and chicken cacciatore.

They began investing in silver and gold--a move that presaged Terry’s growing lack of confidence in government. “You have to remember,” Robert Papovich says now, “people were still worried about inflation and the economy falling apart. They wanted to be self-reliant. That’s why I moved up here. I could have my wood stove and my chain saw and my garden to depend on.”

Both Terry and Lana sold insurance. Lana also represented a line of household products, such as brooms and dustpans. But Terry “never got headed in one direction,” Padilla said recently. “It was very frustrating.”

She brought home some brochures about the Army. It would be an unusual step for a father in his 30s, but perhaps he could make a career of it. He shot every day to get ready.

Terry left in May of 1988 for basic training at Ft. Benning, Ga. He could outrun the 22-year-olds, but he didn’t have much to say to them. He was named platoon leader and won their respect, but they kidded him about his age, sometimes addressing him as “old man,” recalled Marion Curnutte, a fellow Ft. Benning trainee.

On the rifle range, Terry finally found a kindred spirit. It was McVeigh, who shared Terry’s fascination with firearms--and often returned to the barracks with gun and survivalist magazines.

“When he first met Tim, I was pleased,” said Padilla, “because he needed a close friend.”

Both were assigned next to Ft. Riley, Kan., although to different companies. Nichols chauffeured a captain and did paperwork, talking guns with McVeigh on the shooting range. “They’d usually pair up together,” said Shane Cochran, who served in Nichols’ platoon. “Both were kind of loners.”

Within a year, however, his wife had filed for divorce and Terry was granted a hardship discharge to return to Michigan and take charge of the children. She had moved to seek her fortune in Las Vegas, where real estate was booming.

When he returned, Terry seemed hardened.

“I don’t know where he got it, but he had a different outlook,” said his stepson, Troy Osentoski. “He never liked taxes, but until then, it didn’t go beyond that.”

He traveled to the Philippines, where he met Marife Angeles through a friend from a mail-order bride business. After a short courtship by mail, he took her as his wife.

Meanwhile, James Nichols’ marriage to Kelly had come apart. In May of 1987, she accused him of fondling their son.

This was the breaking point. He strongly denied the allegation during questioning by a sheriff’s detective. He passed two polygraph tests, but the judge refused to make his wife take one. His attorney cost $5,000.

“This is where he got his frustration with the local courts,” Morawski said. James began to pore over law books and study the Constitution.

About the same time, he began to explore organic farming, a growing movement to cultivate crops without synthetic chemicals. Some of its partisans believe that organic fertilizers help them raise better produce. Others see benefits for the environment.

And a few see it as the only choice against a government they believe is deliberately poisoning its citizens through artificial chemicals.

James became treasurer of three local organic groups. Their meetings stuck mostly to discussions of farm policies and planting advice. But sometimes politics seeped in.

Zeno Budd, a central Michigan property-rights activist who served two months in jail for crushing a county inspector’s car with a front-end loader, showed up at some meetings of Nichols’ group to get tips on chemicals. He also handed out anti-government literature and later told Nichols about the Patriots group in Mt. Pleasant.

Nichols was intrigued. In a meeting hall one Saturday a month, speakers at the Patriots gathering would explain to a group of 30 listeners that the government uses corporate law to interfere with personal liberties and fails to adhere to the natural law of the Constitution. Drop out of the corporate state, they urged, and it will have no legal jurisdiction.

Their reasoning sounded right to James Nichols. He filed a declaration to the court that June: “Mr. Nichols has changed his status. He is no longer one of your citizens or resident of your de facto government.”

Terry Nichols too became an adherent. He was being sued by Chase Manhattan and First Deposit National banks for non-payment of tens of thousands of dollars in credit card bills. He countersued, asking for a judgment of 14,200 ounces of silver and attorney fees of 1,500 ounces.

When a judgment of $18,365 was entered against him, he paid in January, 1993, with a worthless check of his own design. “How can anyone pay anything with no real true genuine money?” he wrote on a court form.

The brothers had chosen their path. The government was no longer merely the hidebound, tax-bloated interloper of modern political myth. It was an enemy.

*

After a month of Patriot meetings and maneuvers in the winter of 1994, Terry Nichols left Michigan. He settled near Marion, Kan., not far from Ft. Riley, finding work as a ranch hand. A few days after he settled in, he sent a form renouncing his citizenship to 30 county, state and federal officials.

On weekends, after long days riding tractors on Jim Donahue’s cattle farm, he made extra money and connections at local gun shows and military surplus auctions. McVeigh was back in late September, helping Nichols pack to move once again. Nichols told his employer, Donahue, that he was going to sell weapons on the gun show circuit with his friend in Arizona.

Days before Terry left, someone stole 299 sticks of dynamite and 580 blasting caps from a limestone quarry 12 miles away. The case is still open and the FBI is investigating possible links to Nichols and McVeigh.

That November, Morawski remembers, James got a phone call from Terry. The younger brother was grinding ammonium nitrate fertilizer--which enhances its sensitivity as a blasting agent--and breaking down a ton into 2,000 one-pound vials to sell at gun shows.

That same month, Terry appeared suddenly in Las Vegas to visit Josh and to hand Lana the mysterious packet--with its will-like instructions for her and McVeigh, and a key to a storage locker where she found precious metals, pipes, tools and masks. Then he headed with Marife and Nicole to the Philippines for the holidays.

McVeigh was back in Michigan that winter, in the used-car business this time, and not the high end. In January, he sold a 1985 Ford pickup for $400, $100 less than he paid for it. He bought a 1983 Pontiac station wagon for $100 from James. The next month, he sold a 1987 Chevrolet Spectrum for $50.

Then it was Terry’s turn to move again, this time to Herington, Kan. He bought a blue frame house. At a Manhattan, Kan., gun show in late January, surplus dealer David Batsell saw Nichols behind a “crappy table” without a chair, his paltry offerings dwarfed by a competitor’s huge cache of guns. Business was slow. Terry displayed hunting rifles, reloaded ammunition, some surplus rubber all-weather suits and two bottles of ammonium nitrate.

On April 16, according to federal documents, McVeigh called Terry Nichols and asked for a ride to Herington from Oklahoma City. He borrowed Nichols’ pickup for five hours the next day, according to Nichols.

On April 19, a 4,000-pound bomb made out of fertilizer gouged out the concrete-and-glass face of the Murrah federal building, snuffing out the lives of children at the day-care center and elderly pensioners inside the Social Security office, among others.

By the night of April 21, the three men were in custody--McVeigh in Oklahoma, Terry Nichols in Kansas, James Nichols 20 miles from home in the Sanilac County Jail.

The farm that had been their outpost of freedom, where they forged plans and shared their fervor, was aswarm with police dogs, hovering helicopters and agents in black Ninja suits--a scene out of their most apocalyptic imaginings. The government agents seized black powder, blasting caps and a time fuse from a bedroom closet. They took calcium nitrate and hydrogen peroxide from the pole barn. They carried off the mail and political literature.

The revolution was over.

Times staff writer Charles P. Wallace in Manila and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.