Victors Tour Their Spoils: Neo-Nazi Redoubt

For 27 years, Norm Gissel never could have made it past the guard shack at the Aryan Nations headquarters. Now he and other human-rights activists roam the 20-acre compound as if they own the place.

That’s because they do own it--the result of a lawsuit that bankrupted Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler--and this week they are savoring the demolition of what they call “the campus of hate.”

An excavator arrived Wednesday to begin dismantling some of the most potent symbols of Butler’s neo-Nazi organization: the guard shack, a 40-foot watchtower and a commissary with a huge swastika on the roof.

Where skinheads and uniformed Nazi wannabes once goose-stepped around Butler’s property in the woods of northern Idaho, the new owners are planning a human-rights retreat or a children’s camp devoted to diversity.

Gissel, a lawyer who helped bankrupt Butler, smiled broadly as he stood outside the former Aryan Nations office, watching workers haul away garbage.

The Aryan Nations’ fall began in 1998, when its security guards chased a car that they said they’d heard gunfire come from. (It turned out to be a backfire or a firecracker.) The guards fired at the car and forced it into a ditch. One of them grabbed the driver, local resident Victoria Keenan, jabbed her with a rifle butt and put a gun to her head.

Keenan and her son, Jason, sued Butler and last year won a $6.3-million verdict. They gained possession of the 20-acre compound and its nine buildings after Butler filed for bankruptcy protection, and in March they sold it for $250,000 to the Carr Foundation, a human-rights group based in Cambridge, Mass.

There was a festive air at the compound this week. A dozen law enforcement officials who had tracked the Aryan Nations toured the site Wednesday, posing for photos and poking around the abandoned buildings.

“We’re just sightseers like everyone else,” said one FBI agent, who refused to give his name or allow journalists to photograph the group. “Some of these guys are still working,” he explained.

It was a last chance to see the place more or less intact, and the best view was from the 40-foot watchtower.

To the west was a pile of charred timbers in a pasture, left over from cross burnings.