Oklahoma City Bomb Blew Fortier Onto Razor’s Edge : Profile: Tied to the two prime suspects, Arizonan now faces a grave choice. How did he come to this crossroads?

Michael Joseph Fortier is in the worst jam of his 26-year-old life.

Fortier’s Army buddy and best friend, Timothy J. McVeigh, stands accused as the central suspect in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Another member of their old Army unit, Terry L. Nichols, has also been charged.

With his own fate possibly at stake, Fortier appears positioned to strengthen the government’s case against McVeigh--and to inject momentum into what has become a painstaking nationwide hunt for the bombing culprits.

Fortier at first maintained a steely public front following the April 19 bombing. He urged his friend “to be strong.” McVeigh, he said, had done nothing wrong.

“Honestly, I do not believe Tim blew up any building in Oklahoma,” Fortier told The Times and CNN on April 26. “Everyone should be supportive of him because he’s an innocent man.”

But Fortier’s posture has changed, dramatically. Faced with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury in Oklahoma City, people familiar with the case say, Fortier began providing the FBI with information that could only bolster the government’s evidence against McVeigh--including a description of how he cased the Murrah building. In so doing, Fortier also risked implicating himself in the planning of a crime that killed 168 people.

Fortier now faces a monumental choice with potentially grave consequences for him, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, as well as for a government eager for stern retribution:

If he cooperates and provides credible information about the bombing’s genesis, Fortier must also certainly admit complicity in the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. He would have to go to prison. The gamble would be that his lawyer, Mack K. Martin, could negotiate a deal to salvage some of his life with his family.

But if Fortier chooses not to cooperate, he would leave the government to make the case by itself, with no holds barred and no quarter given. In the end, he might walk away a free man or with a light sentence. Or he could be executed by lethal injection, leaving his child fatherless.

Fortier’s choice holds major implications for U.S. law enforcement, whose investigation now is producing only halting results. If he could provide potentially clinching testimony, authorities would have to weigh its value against the possible backlash of allowing lenient treatment for a terror-bombing conspirator.

According to legal sources both inside and outside the government, such firsthand testimony can be crucial in a conspiracy case--and obtaining it would be exceedingly tempting to prosecutors in this one.

“It’s far from a weak case against McVeigh,” said one federal source. “But right now what we have is clearly circumstantial evidence. Fortier could give us a live witness to put the cap on that. Jurors always like to hear from an insider.”

But such a witness could be running a deadly risk if he waits too long to choose his course, according to John C. Gibbons, a former Justice Department prosecutor.

“In a conspiracy case there’s always a weak link--somebody is going to break,” Gibbons said. “So Fortier’s value as a witness, his leverage with the government, is a perishable commodity. Right now he’s worth something [to prosecutors]. Tomorrow he could be worth zero--and then he’s looking at the death penalty, with no leverage.”

Nearly seven weeks after the blast in Oklahoma City, Fortier still mulls his options.

Federal officials know where to find him. Although he returned last week to the high desert town of Kingman, roughly 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas, Fortier is under constant surveillance, and agents on Wednesday again removed materials from the Fortiers’ home, located on Kingman’s northern outskirts.

Yet for now, agents and prosecutors await the next move of a young man who until April 19 was leading an obscure life, virtually unknown to those outside his immediate sphere.

Hardened in Army

Who is Mike Fortier?

From interviews with dozens of people who have known him--including neighbors, childhood friends, teachers, Army buddies and co-workers--a dual portrait emerges:

First there is the good-humored kid who gravitated toward cars, girls and Budweiser. This is the lanky, crane-necked Fortier who, in a club scrapbook, typed this description of his ambitions as he was about to graduate from Kingman High School:

“I do not put much importance on money, so my future plans are to enjoy every minute of my life and to take events as they come.”

Later came the hardened Fortier, who emerged from three years in the Army a more solemn man, prone to citing selective passages of American history and the Constitution that reinforced his newfound love of guns and distrust of the government.

After Fortier’s Army tour, “he wasn’t as much open and carefree,” said Bradley Legg, a boyhood friend who bumped into Fortier at a party in 1992 after the latter’s discharge. “He had a little bit of an attitude.”

Said another childhood friend, Pete Romani, who played Little League baseball with Fortier, worked at a hardware store with him and, of late, has visited him and offered continuing support: “I thought he was different than before he left [for the Army]. So I think the service did change him. . . . He just wasn’t as down to earth. He didn’t seem like the old Mike. He seemed a lot more uptight.”

This also is the Fortier who by 1988 had met McVeigh and Nichols while stationed at Ft. Riley, Kan., the Fortier who thought enough of McVeigh to have him serve as best man when he married Lori Hart of Kingman on July 25, 1994, in Las Vegas.

Easygoing, Genial

The son of a forklift operator, Fortier grew up the youngest of three brothers and a sister. Both of his brothers preceded him in the military; the oldest, John, has made a career of it.

Friends and former teachers say Fortier had above-average intelligence. But rather than apply his ability, he seemed content to cruise academically, to party with beer and marijuana, to reach for what would pass as cool.

He “never showed any anger or hate,” said Legg, noting Fortier was unfailingly kind to Legg’s older brother, who was badly crippled with muscular dystrophy.

Although not much of an athlete, Fortier played on the Little League baseball team managed by Legg’s father, Bill, and made an impression with his pleasant personality. “The kid tried . . . did everything you asked,” said Bill Legg. “I just have a hard time imagining the kid I knew going out and deliberately hurting somebody.”

Likewise, Fortier was a genial presence in Kingman High’s work-experience program--”a great kid,” said teacher Michele Russo, who oversaw the group. “He was always there” for the after-school and weekend activities. “There was never any indication he would be militant in any way or against the government or anything. . . . I’ve taught 32 semesters, and I can probably remember 5% of the kids. And I can remember him like yesterday.”

His Gung-Ho Friend

Barely a year after graduating from Kingman High, Fortier joined the Army--and his life would soon change.

Shane Cochran, a fellow infantryman, said he quickly found Fortier to be “my kind of guy.” Cochran said he and Fortier would “hang out on weekends,” would barbecue, drink beer, smoke some marijuana, watch movies.

“He was a good friend of mine,” said Cochran, who now lives in Alabama. “He was the kind of guy you’d want your daughter to date. A very nice, soft-spoken-type guy. . . . He didn’t worry about life. He didn’t talk about the future.”

Cochran said that while Fortier had several friends in the 16th Infantry Regiment’s Charlie Company, his friendship with one of the soldiers in the unit--the grim and gung-ho Tim McVeigh--always puzzled him.

“I never really understood that,” Cochran said. “McVeigh . . . nobody liked him.” Cochran added: “There was always something strange about Terry Nichols, and nobody could put their finger on it.”

While Fortier’s other friends partied and had a good time, McVeigh studied right-wing extremist newsletters, talked incessantly about his guns and polished his military equipment.

Unlike McVeigh, Fortier--who had a shoulder injury--did not serve in the Persian Gulf War. When he returned to Kingman from Ft. Riley, Fortier at first lived with relatives and took a job at the local True Value hardware store, where he had worked before joining the Army.

Soon enough, his friend McVeigh, disappointed that his military career was not advancing, followed him to Kingman. Here the pair’s lives appeared to link ever more closely:

McVeigh accompanied Fortier and his parents on at least one boat outing on the nearby Colorado River. When McVeigh applied for a box at a commercial mail drop in town in the spring of 1993, he listed Fortier’s address as his home. The owner of the True Value franchise said he hired McVeigh as a yard hand in February, 1994, based on Fortier’s recommendation.

Neighbors, who asked not to be identified, said they would play cards--usually hearts or spades--with Fortier and sometimes with McVeigh. One of the neighbors said McVeigh’s views of the world at times sounded more tempered than Fortier’s.

Once someone who had no apparent political views, Fortier now railed against any effort by the government to limit citizens’ use of firearms. He spoke enthusiastically about the “patriot” or “militia” movement that was warning of a diabolical plot to establish a “one world” government and crush individuals’ freedom.

And he spoke in support of the spreading effort to blunt the government’s power.

Some acquaintances wondered whether Fortier by then even accepted the idea of a government at all.

“Tim said we had to have some form of government, otherwise we’d have nothing but anarchy,” said a neighbor. “He [McVeigh] would kind of play mediator between Mike and me.”

Then as now, the Fortier trailer was easy to find, with a U.S. flag above a yellow, brown and green Revolutionary War flag, emblazoned with a snake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.” McVeigh lived with the Fortiers for scattered periods of time. McVeigh also stayed sometimes with his friend Terry Nichols, who farmed and did other jobs in Kansas and Michigan.

Last December, Fortier quit his bookkeeping job at True Value, complaining about the size of his Christmas bonus. One of Fortier’s former high school teachers said he was shocked to come across the once happy-go-lucky “goofball” on March 5 at a Gun & Knife Show at the local Mohave County Fairgrounds.

“He was a different Fortier than I knew in high school,” said Joe Russo, Fortier’s former social studies teacher. “He was cam-ohed out [in camouflage fatigues and Army boots]. We talked a little. He seemed really intense.”

Fortier, accompanied that day by his wife and another man, was selling an assortment of weapons, Russo said. Elsewhere in the hall, literature stridently opposing gun control and the Clinton Administration was being distributed.

McVeigh himself was selling military surplus directly and through the mail from Kingman. And when McVeigh went out of town this March, Fortier picked up his mail a handful of times, according to Lynda Willoughby, manager of The Mail Room. Records verified by a local motel show that McVeigh left Kingman for the last time on the morning of April 12, seven days before the bombing.

According to government sources, Fortier told federal officials that in the days before the bombing, he and McVeigh toured the federal building in Oklahoma City floor by floor, posing as job applicants so they could survey the structure.

Within days of the blast, the FBI, working to reconstruct the movements of their chief suspect, made their way to Fortier’s trailer to find answers.

Friends of Fortier in Kingman, many who have been questioned by the FBI, said he has been spurred to cooperate with investigators by the specter of both himself and his wife, Lori, being prosecuted.

“That’s his soft spot,” Romani said, referring to the potential ramifications for the couple’s daughter. “He mentioned that to me” during a recent visit to offer support. “He said there was a lot of heat.”

Fortier and his lawyer did not return telephone messages seeking comment. But Fortier’s mother, who had earlier defended both her son and McVeigh, spoke differently in a recent interview.

Irene Fortier told The Times that her son “just got caught in the middle of something that is unexplainable. . . . We just can’t understand this. He just got caught in the middle of something. . . . We can’t figure out how this guy [McVeigh] came over here and got him in the middle of that. . . . It’s just beyond us.”

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.