Neo-Nazi Tied to Ways of Violence

COEUR d'ALENE, Idaho —  As a landmark civil trial aimed at bankrupting the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations got underway Tuesday, a former lieutenant testified that leader Richard Butler once gave him a bottle to build a crude firebomb intended for the offices of a Jewish real estate broker.

The testimony from Charles Hardman marked a crucial opening in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s case because it for the first time linked Butler--an 82-year-old racist preacher who for years has sidestepped the acts of murder, robbery and mayhem committed by his followers--to direct advocacy of violence.

Hardman and another former lieutenant also offered damaging evidence that Butler knowingly harbored fugitives within his security staff and occasionally allowed them to roam outside his Hayden Lake, Idaho, compound armed with automatic weapons.

The trial, a classic confrontation between one of America’s best-known neo-Nazis and veteran Ku Klux Klan fighter Morris Dees Jr., opened under exhaustive security in a small Idaho courtroom.

As a dozen tattooed Aryan Nations supporters marched outside, Butler sat silently at the defense table while Kootenai County District Judge Charles W. Hosack swore in the nine-woman, three-man panel; 11 of the jurors are white, one is a Filipina.

The issue before them is the August 1998 attack by a truckload of Aryan security guards against Victoria Keenan and her teenage son. The two had been driving past the group’s compound when the guards--apparently believing they had been fired upon--chased them, beat them with the butts of their guns and threatened to kill them.

Two former Aryan Nations security guards, Jesse Warfield and John Yaeger, have pleaded guilty to the attack and are serving sentences. They also are defendants in the civil trial and are representing themselves.

“I’m not going to defend what those guys did,” Butler’s attorney, Edgar Steele, said Tuesday. “It was terrible.” But Steele said that Butler, while “a genuine racist [with] reprehensible points of view . . . well beyond being politically incorrect,” has a strict policy of nonviolence and would not have sanctioned the attack.

Far from operating a racist military compound on his 20 acres of trees and outbuildings, Steele said, “what goes on at Pastor Butler’s property in Hayden is really more akin to a homeless shelter for exceedingly politically incorrect misfits, malcontents, borderline derelicts and all manner of people that drift in and out. . . . This is the first time in 25 years there’s been a lapse of this sort connected with Pastor Butler’s property.”

Dees left two jurors wiping away tears as he recounted the roadside attack in his lilting Southern accent. Keenan, he said, had to deny her Native American heritage in order to save her life--and the life of her son.

“She’s a proud woman. She’s proud of her Native American heritage. But she had to deny it that night. She said: ‘I’m a white farmer girl.’ And Yaeger finally put his gun down.” Even now, Dees said, “if she’s driving down the road and she sees a headlight behind her, she knows . . . the Aryans are coming to get her.”

Dees said he would prove that the rural compound--a gathering point for white separatists from all over America--had no security regulations for its staff, that Butler failed to conduct adequate background checks and that he presided over an environment of “total paranoia” that led to violence.

Hardman--a fugitive from a parole violation charge in Georgia who wound up at the Aryan Nations compound--decided to testify for the Southern Poverty Law Center after Butler kicked him out for harboring a young runaway girl.

He told of a series of incidents of apparent vandalism that worried group members in the months before the Keenan incident. One night in February 1998, for example, a mattress was set afire at the compound. Hardman testified that he saw someone running away through the trees. Hardman said he fired three shots into the air. Butler, he said, was extremely angry.

“He was hollering that it was the goddamn Jews and he was tired of this [stuff],” Hardman said. “I had never heard him curse up to that point. . . . It just felt like my skin was crawling, my hair was tingling, and I was willing to do about anything to protect Pastor Butler and the Aryan Nations.”

A week earlier, the Aryan Nations had put out a flier targeting a local Jewish real estate broker, accusing him of giving favorable deals to minorities, “trying to destroy the last section of the country that was for white people.” Hardman said he decided that night to throw a Molotov cocktail at the broker’s office, or one of his listed properties.

“I wanted to get even: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I wanted to burn something down,” Hardman said. He said he told Butler his plans and told him that he had some gasoline and a rag to build the firebomb. But he needed a glass jar.

Butler went in the house “and rummaged around and he came back out and he handed me an old Coke bottle,” Hardman testified.

He said he felt compelled to act on Butler’s behalf because “I felt that he was the leader of the white race, he was the second Adolf Hitler.”

Another ex-security guard, Scott Dabbs, testified Tuesday that Butler’s former second-in-command ordered the preparation of a set of security regulations--backdated to look as though they were in place before the Keenan attack--shortly after the lawsuit was filed. He said that Butler and Michael Teague, who is also a defendant in the case, attempted to give one of the guns used in the attack to a friendly local private investigator. Teague “said we had to get rid of it. . . . He said it could be used as evidence against us in a trial,” Dabbs testified.

But under cross-examination by Steele, David Perry said that it was his own idea to borrow the gun to use in his bounty hunting work. In the end, another Aryan Nations member drove off the compound with the gun in his trunk.

Steele attempted to portray both Hardman and Dabbs as young renegades who were angry after Butler ordered them off the compound for violating its rules.

The trial, expected to take about a week, has been held under high security in part because Dees repeatedly has been listed as an assassination target by hate groups. After court, he was ushered away by his own security force to an undisclosed location, reportedly a private residence outside of town.

Yet there have been few of the raucous demonstrations that typically surround Aryan Nations public events in Coeur d’Alene. Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League traveled here from Los Angeles to watch the trial and occasionally taunted from the sidelines as Aryan supporters waved flags and ushered Butler into his old Ford van.

Vincent Bertollini, a former Silicon Valley millionaire who has been one of Butler’s strongest supporters, rode up on his gleaming motorcycle with a “Jesus is Lord” license plate holder.

In an attempt to influence potential jurors before the trial, Bertollini had printed up a flier about Dees and mailed it to every household in Coeur d’Alene.

“We came to northern Idaho to get away from diversity and multiculturalism,” he said Tuesday. “Richard Butler will not leave this area. His dream was here. If somehow he ends up living in a wooden box under a bridge, he will stay here. . . . The point is, this is not going to go away. We are not going away, period.”