Money Trail Details Blast Suspects’ ‘Lost’ World : Oklahoma: Relying on multiple names and addresses and credit schemes, McVeigh and Nichols lived a life designed to leave no footprints.

Terry L. Nichols just showed up one day. No one had ever seen him in town before. He did not have a job. He did not have a Social Security number. He put a large cash down payment on a house on Second Street and moved in. When he bought the house, he didn’t even bother to look inside the garage.

To his new neighbors--the local real estate agent, the bank, the military surplus store--his arrival out of the blue last winter seemed odd but not so bizarre that they wanted to pry into his business. Now that he is in prison and awaiting trial as a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing case, it has slowly begun to make sense.

Nichols came here to get lost.

“We’re a very small town, and we’re centrally located in the country,” said Georgia Rucker, a local real estate agent who put together a cash contract for Nichols’ new home. “And here comes this man trying to get away from his past.”

What Nichols’ neighbors did not know, however, is that what they were seeing was only the surface wrinkles in a secret life. It was a life apparently designed to leave no footprints--more sophisticated and ingenious than the simple, drifting existence that Nichols and his former Army friend Timothy J. McVeigh seemed to have been living at the time they were arrested.

In the six months since a massive truck bomb blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 169 people and injuring 600 more, a small army of federal investigators has been tracing the origins of the attack and the men accused as its perpetrators.

Slowly and methodically, in trips to small towns like Herington, to courthouses, to banks, pawnshops and other business ventures, they have discovered a murky, limbo-like world in normal Middle America. It is a world in which a man can own property but have no credit history, have enough money to live but no job or apparent income.

For Nichols and McVeigh, it was a life of travel, sometimes overseas, a life of multiple names and addresses, often fabricated, a life allegedly dedicated to the steady accumulation of guns, vehicles and supplies that could be used in a blow against the government.

For investigators, it has been a difficult mystery to unravel. They are still piecing together how Nichols and McVeigh could have subsisted in this nether world, theorizing at times about a hidden benefactor.

But now, the discovery of a twisted trail of financial transactions, including bad checks, credit card applications and checking account information obtained by The Times, has begun to tell a larger story.

By cleverly manipulating applications for credit cards and checking accounts, Nichols and McVeigh allegedly managed to exploit an assortment of financial institutions, including giant Chase Manhattan Bank, and to keep thousands of dollars coming in while they were both mostly unemployed.

As a road map to this world, investigators believe, McVeigh and Nichols relied heavily on a book called “Armed and Dangerous,” which details the rise of the survivalist right. A copy was found by the FBI on a tabletop in Nichols’ home here after his arrest. McVeigh carried his copy with him.

In one key chapter, the book recites a series of basic precepts designed to help survivalists drop out of the modern world.

Among its directives:

* Become invisible to investigators. Stay out of government files. Use hide-outs and deep cover.

Nichols’ sudden appearance in Herington (population 2,800) was his way of checking out of mainstream America. McVeigh, when he was not staying with close friends or in roadside motels, slept in the back of his Pontiac station wagon.

* Stop generating financial records. Hide assets. Discover banking alternatives.

Nichols stashed large piles of cash, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Investigators found $5,228 in a plastic bag in his closet. His ex-wife found $20,000 taped underneath a drawer in her Las Vegas house. McVeigh, although apparently not as well-heeled as Nichols, was eventually arrested with $255 in bills and another “couple grand cash” that he said was at his disposal for bail--money that apparently had been kept in an envelope in his car.

* Live nomadically. Obtain multiple addresses.

Nichols at various times identified his home as in Kansas, Michigan and Nevada. McVeigh moved to and from New York, Michigan and Arizona. He carried personal checks on different banks, including one in Georgia and one in Ohio, and listed different addresses, one in New York and one in Michigan.

“That book was important to them, particularly to McVeigh,” said a source close to the case who asked not to be identified. “He told a lot of people to read that chapter. He was always pointing out that chapter.”

“It’s a strange world for us to understand,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who now does security consulting. “If you go to certain places in the country, you find people who drift and who have no fixed address. It’s a description of people on the margin.”

It can be traced back at least three years.

In late 1992, McVeigh applied for a Signet Bank credit card. He listed his employer as the “U.S. Army,” although he had left the service more than a year earlier.

The following month, Nichols attempted to settle an $18,000 claim by Chase Manhattan for two delinquent credit cards. In state court in Michigan, where Nichols was then living, he submitted a check for the amount on a note of his own design and called it a “Certified Fractional Reserve Check.”

Nichols told the court that he had “the right to issue this money under the 9th, 10th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” He challenged a legal form submitted by Chase Manhattan, asking him to divulge some of his trial strategy if he planned to fight the lawsuit.

The questionnaire asked at one point: “Number of exhibits you will present?”

Nichols responded: “Did General Schwartzkolf [sic] tell Saddam his battle plans?”

Lawyers for Chase Manhattan said the bank has asked them not to divulge whether any of the money was ever recovered.

In June, 1993, McVeigh moved to Kingman, Ariz. He began paying rent for a trailer home in cash, mostly in $100 bills. He showed up wearing a uniform from the local State Security firm, a job he quit within two months.

Also that June, he applied for a pre-approved credit line of $2,500 for a Visa card. He listed his employment with a different company, Sentry Security.

Taking a cue from Nichols, McVeigh wrote his own fractional reserve check for $2,730.58 in September of that year, in an apparent attempt to deposit the money in his Army credit union account. He then wrote an insufficient-funds check for $291.22 for a TEC-9 assault pistol at Pat’s Pawn and Gun Shop in Ogden, Kan., just outside the Ft. Riley, Kan., Army base where he and Nichols had served together.

“Yeah,” recalled Pat Livingston, the gun shop proprietor. “He hit me with a hot check.”

Livingston said that two years earlier, McVeigh paid him about $600 in cash for a .45-caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol--the same weapon he was carrying when he was arrested 90 minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing. (Several months before the bombing, Nichols paid him $1,300 in cash for two Glock pistols of his own, Livingston said.)

In October, 1993, McVeigh wrote more bad checks. One was for $115 worth of ammunition purchased from R&R; Enterprises in New Holstein, Wis. That same day, he wrote a second bad check for $25 to another store for more ammunition.

The first check was drawn on a bank in Columbus, Ohio, and listed him as Timothy J. McVeigh with an address in Flint, Mich. The second, on a Columbus, Ga., bank, identified him as Tim J. McVeigh from Lockport, N.Y.

By February, 1994, McVeigh was working at a hardware store in Kingman. His pay was $5 an hour. He quit within two months. In March, Nichols was hired out as a ranch hand near Marion, Kan., half an hour’s drive south of Herington. He quit within six months.

Beginning in September, when the government says the bombing conspiracy began, Nichols and McVeigh allegedly bought $4,000 worth of ammonium nitrate fertilizer at a co-op in McPherson, Kan., not far from Herington.

In October, they began renting--under assumed names--storage lockers in Council Grove, Kan. Sharri Furman, secretary for the Boots U-Store-It company, said Nichols rented the units for as long as three months at a time. She said Nichols would make the 30-minute drive from Herington east to Council Grove and pay up to $90 in cash.

“He’d just pull up at the deli shop, where the owner works, and pay us cash,” Furman said. “And just as fast, he was gone.”

The robbery of Roger Moore’s gun collection in Royal, Ark., occurred Nov. 5, 1994. Moore was an acquaintance of McVeigh’s. McVeigh has an alibi--he was attending an Akron, Ohio, gun show, where he borrowed $100 from a gun dealer--but the grand jury indictment in the bombing case states only that McVeigh and Nichols “caused” the robbery.

Shortly afterward, Nichols flew to the Philippines. He left a note with his ex-wife, Lana Padilla, for McVeigh. She opened the letter and found a key to another storage locker that Nichols and McVeigh allegedly had rented in Las Vegas. She found $20,000 in gold and silver bars and coins, camouflage gear and a ski mask in the locker. She also discovered the $20,000 in cash taped underneath a drawer in her own house.

With Nichols gone, McVeigh and Michael Fortier, a third Army buddy who has pleaded guilty to related charges and is expected to testify against his friends, rented a Ford Crown Victoria in Manhattan, Kan. The government believes that the car was used to haul the stolen guns. McVeigh and Fortier rented the vehicle with a credit card. But they paid cash--$300--when they dropped off the car three days later in Kingman.

In March, Nichols moved to Herington. Later that month, he purchased $3,250 worth of military surplus items at a Ft. Riley auction. McVeigh moved into a motel in Kingman and paid his rent in advance--$220.40--with hundred-dollar bills.

Five days before the bombing, he moved again--this time to the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kan. He paid $88.95 in cash for four nights. Next, he allegedly put down a cash deposit for a Ryder rental truck in Junction City--the truck destroyed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

McVeigh was arrested 90 minutes after the bombing. Nichols surrendered minutes after his name appeared on television. The FBI came to Herington and seized the escrow account on his house at the local bank.

The agents interviewed Rucker, the local realtor. She told them how Nichols had put together a special contract-for-deed on the house. He put about $5,000 down on the $25,000 blue frame house, she said, and agreed to make monthly cash payments. Rucker said that when she asked about his background, Nichols said he had no Social Security number and that the Army had instead given him an identification number.

She asked about his job. He said that he hoped to set up a business selling empty ammunition boxes. It all seemed strange at the time but it makes more sense now, she said.

In August, Rucker heard from Nichols again. He wrote her a letter from the federal prison in El Reno, Okla., thanking her for her help on the house. He closed the letter with a tirade against the government. And then he told her, oddly enough, that if he ever met someone wanting to buy a house in Herington, he would recommend her.

“It was like he was still oblivious,” she said, “still living in another world.”

Serrano reported from Herington and Oklahoma City; Ostrow reported from Washington.