The Terrible Price of Hatred in America

Coming to Showtime Sunday is a two-program package about real-life white supremacists who rob and murder for racial purity.

The so-so movie “Brotherhood of Murder” traces Tom Martinez’s evolving role in a dusky anti-government hate group known as the Order, and his subsequent redemption and decision to spy on these dangerously twisted fruitcakes for the FBI.

Dialogue here is peppered with racial slurs as down-on-his-luck family man Martinez (William Baldwin) comes under the spell of magnetic leader Bob Mathews (Peter Gallagher) and other “regular guys” who blame their own hard times on the minority “filth” they plot to eradicate. Most famous is the 1984 gunning down of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg, not long after which Martinez turns informer.

The much better documentary that follows, “Brotherhood of Hate,” is about the racist Kehoe family whose once-promising eldest son, Chevie, was propelled on a murderous course as a “white warrior” that landed him a life sentence without parole. Chevie Kehoe, too, admired Mathews, as well as Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, and is shown here telling a “Hard Copy” interviewer that he despises Jews because they “have nothing to give” to society.

Are these programs timely? Absolutely, as surely as there remains an Aryan Nations that promotes brutal mayhem in the U.S. and inspires other groups and individuals to do the same.

You could go on and on. When it comes to craters of misery on the home front, though, nothing exceeds the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building that killed 168. Closer to the present, two anti-government militia members were arraigned in Sacramento this week on charges related to an alleged plot to blow up targets in Northern California. And only last August an avowed white supremacist named Bufford Furrow confessed to shooting up the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and then murdering a Filipino American mail carrier.

Menacing killers and Sieg Heil poster boys to be feared? Unquestionably. Yet consider this.

Local Jewish pride in Shawn Green, the temple-going young slugger who joined the Dodgers recently, was a topic on Al Rantel’s KABC radio show the other day, and one caller’s anti-Semitism was rather scary.

Not because he screamed. Or ranted. Or threatened. Or spewed epithets. Or lashed out in a fury.

Scary . . . because he didn’t.

The ugly, seething hatreds of snarling, swastika-waving neo-Nazis, skinhead bully boys and other white supremacists are obviously vile. You can deal with them to some extent, though. They’re public, out in the open, in your face. You know where they stand. In a broad sense, they have a history whose trail of evil is deeply imprinted on many cultures, the tonnage of their damage weighing heavily this century, the cries of their victims resonating across generations.

In the early 1900s, they slaughtered Greeks and Armenians. In the U.S., they lynched African Americans. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, they murdered up to 13 million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others in Europe. And skipping ahead to this decade, they butchered Tutsis in Rwanda and wiped out untold numbers of innocents in the Balkans.

Pick your horror, in other words, the point being that, however lethal, this enemy is identifiable, at least. This enemy you know.

Yet equally insidious in the U.S. are the smarmy other guys who operate from the shadows. They sweet talk their bigotry and keep it deceptively oiled, then ooze it out like poison when they sniff an opportunity.

“She was calling us New York Jews,” a senior White House aide bristled to another in this season’s debut of NBC’s “The West Wing” after dressing down a bigoted Christian right zealot who had sneered at their “New York sense of humor” and snapped to a colleague: “They think they are so much smarter.”

“They” being code for Jews.

However grounded in reality, that was Hollywood fiction. Yet the “T” word--”they”--was also evoked in that call to Rantel regarding Green, the Jewish baseball star. Rantel had picked this topic with nothing malevolent in mind, surely, and was merely responding to a story in that morning’s Los Angeles Times about Orange County native Green being a hot ticket with his fellow Jews here.

Although this caller was one of many who phoned Rantel’s show that day, he stood out most in a tune-in that was brief, but long enough to sense where this caveman with a civil tongue was going.

This is mostly paraphrasing, but the point he was making in a benign-sounding monotone had something to do with Jews needing to mend their ways. And something to do with others in the U.S. resenting Jews for favoring “their own” and being “Jews first and Americans second.” He wondered how less fortunate non-Jews feel when seeing Jews who are prosperous, clearly implying the plight of poorer Americans was the fault of Jews. Not that he bore such Jews any ill will, of course.

Rantel was hardly silent during this. He repeatedly tried nudging the man gently--too gently, arguably--toward more rational thinking. But the guy kept returning like a boomerang. “It just seems . . . ,” he would come back again and again.

The talk-show caller’s deceptively mellow demeanor comes to mind when viewing “Brotherhood of Murder,” in which Gallagher plays Mathews much like the shrewd, velvety, smooth-talking fanatic that Martinez describes in a memoir on which Robert J. Avrech’s teleplay is based. In that book, Martinez quotes Mathews as instructing his heavily armed militia followers to keep a low public profile and never express their beliefs about race overtly.

His preferred means of expression instead are robbery, bombing and murder, with Mathews himself coming to a fiery end in a shootout with the FBI.

The Martin Bell-directed “Brotherhood of Murder” does convey the danger that’s out there in a thin way, but never probes the complex layers of that threat. Despite its volatility, moreover, the story is somehow lifeless and soulless, while schmaltzing up its boffo ending and excluding Martinez’s charges of FBI ineptitude--he claims the feds almost got him killed by blowing his cover--that he makes in his book. As Martinez’s wife, meanwhile, Kelly Lynch seems much too savvy and urbane to even reluctantly tolerate her husband’s supremacist activities en route to his righteous conversion.

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Although “Brotherhood of Murder” leaves an impression that the Martinez family may have entered the government’s witness protection program, that isn’t true.

That federal program is explored instead in “Witness Protection,” a low wallop of an HBO film starring Tom Sizemore as fictional Boston mob figure Bobby Batton (not Italian American, happily), who is convinced by authorities to turn on his crime colleagues after surviving their attempt to murder him and his family in their swanky home.

Most of the story takes place in a claustrophobic secret location where a federal agent (Forest Whitaker) orients Batton and his wife, Cindy (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and their two kids, and rehearses them with their new identities prior to their relocation to Seattle.

The trouble is that the once-wealthy Battons are now penniless, meaning that Tony must become a working stiff like most of his fellow Americans. As tensions rise and explosions occur, the Daniel Therriault script tries to create sympathy for the suffering Battons. But despite nice direction by Richard Pearce and good work by Sizemore and Mastrantonio, and Shawn Hatosy as their teenage son, it just doesn’t work.

The process of orientation is only moderately interesting. And it’s impossible to feel much of anything for this dysfunctional family, especially that obnoxious mug Batton and his wife, who has benefited materially from his life of crime. Let them go to Seattle, make an honest buck, and good riddance.

* “Witness Protection” will be shown Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-VL (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17 with special advisories for violence and coarse language).

* “Brotherhood of Murder” will be shown Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.