September 4, 2025 • 55 mins
As the FBI closes in on The Order, agents uncover the group’s hierarchy, its trail of violence, and the extremist vision fueling it, leading to explosive raids and landmark prosecutions.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. This episode contains
discussions of sensitive topics including violence, hate, crimes, and the
use of discriminatory language and slurs. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
In the criminal justice system, landmark trials transcend the courtroom
to reshape the law. The brave many women who investigate
and prosecute these cases are part of a select group
that is defined American history. These are their stories. December eighth,
nineteen eighty four, would be Island, Washington.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
The high speed pursuit for Allenburg's killers didn't end on
a highway. It led to a bluff above Puget Sound,
where a two story cabin sat silent in the dark,
But it wasn't empty.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Bob Matthews will not surrender, he refuses.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
He was armed, cornered and waiting.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Darkness came. We decided to bring helicopters in.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
The choppers dropped low, the thump of their rotor blades
cracked against the tree tops.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Set them right down on top of the roof of
Blowing shingles off the roof.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
The helicopter illuminated the rear of the house with a
huge ten thousand kindlepower spotlight.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
It was meant to flush Matthews out and enable a
safe arrest, but he had other plans.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Matthews opened up on the helicopter with a AR fifteen.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
The battle had just begun.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
I got a call, get out to LaGuardia Airport.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
There's been a bombing.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
There was a thirty two foot crater in front of
what was left of the building.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I was trying to figure out, Am I dead?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Am I alive? Where am I?
Speaker 1 (02:13):
I'm Aniseega Nicolazzi.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
That's why terrorism works.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
It doesn't care who you are.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order,
criminal justice system. The nineteen eighty four killing of Denver
talk radio host Alan Berg had all the hallmarks of
a targeted hit. Was it someone he defended on his
(02:39):
show or was it part of something even bigger and
more dangerous for law enforcement to get from suspicion to
a courtroom that would take evidence and in the weeks
after the shooting, FBI Special Agent Wayne Mannis started to
collect what he needed.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I am preparing to get a wealth of information out
of the area. In Congress at the Area Nations Compound
July nineteen eighty four. Larry and the police department over
and Spokane. They've got some informants they're going to send
in and I'll get privy for what's happening.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
It was one of the largest annual gatherings of white
supremacists in the country. Wayne had been tracking them for months,
but still didn't have the green light to do more.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
I complete this report to get authorization for a full
scale investigation near the end of June, and I send
it off. We go through the Aryan Compound in July
and I still don't have authorization to do anything.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All Wayne could do was watch and listen. But from
the sidelines, Wayne saw something percolating that caught his attention.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
There was a guy that gave speeches there, a real
charismatic and his name was Lewis Beam. Lewis Beam was
a member of the k Clarks Klan out of Texas
and former Vietnam guy. He was a machine gunner, so
he has training and a lot of experience.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But it wasn't Beam's combat record that made him dangerous.
It was his ideas. Here again is terrorism researcher Michael Jensen.
Speaker 7 (04:24):
Beam was able to articulate a set of tactical ideas
that became a key feature of the organization. One of
the most important foundational ideas in this movement is the
idea of leaderless resistance.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Beam was more than another loud voice at the podium.
He was shaping the white supremacist playbook.
Speaker 7 (04:46):
What Beam did was really to promote this idea that
anyone in everyone could get involved in the movement. Don't
wait for someone to come to you, start your own militia.
As long as everyone agrees on the ideology and the
tactics that they're willing to use, the movement will survive. Ultimately,
(05:07):
what he wrote about leaderless resistance became a foundational belief
for the movement.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
And by the time of the Aryan Congress, Beam had
been brought into the fold by one of the very
men Wain was watching, Robert Matthews.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Unbeknownst to me, he's one of the guys that Bob
has recruited as an Aryan warrior during the time of
the aria In Congress, this guy's given us speech and
he says, we've already eliminated one of the most prominent
obnoxious Jews in our society. And of course I know
alan Berg has been killed, so what are you going
(05:47):
to think? That's what I'm thinking. This guy is saying
we have done this.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
This was more than just rhetoric. It was an admission.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So I called repde and I said, I'm wondering about
this guy Lewis Beam. They said, well, we don't know
about him, but we got a suspect. And the suspect
is David Lane, who had a long and heated conversation
with him, and Alan Bert just absolutely slaughtered him in
the conversation. We think maybe David Lane. So he says,
(06:23):
maybe you guys could take it up, and I said, yeah,
you bet we will.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Now wein had a name and an idea allen Berg's
murder might not be an isolated act of violence, but
potentially part of a much larger conspiracy and.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Kind of read into what my thought process was at
that time. All this criminal stuff is happening, and in
my mind, I'm pushing it all into one group people. Yep.
Can I prove it? No, I can't prove it, but.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It's but you're starting to see it. You're starting to
figure it out, like each spoke and how you're.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Going to go after them exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Wayne had had a partial view, but now could see
the entire wheel. Its spokes were made up of white
supremacists and potential killers. The center was Bob Matthews. For weeks,
Wayne had been circling Matthew's group. He had informants at
Aryan nations, He had names and locations, but what he
(07:23):
didn't have was permission to chase down either. That changed
in early August.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
After their annual area in Congress. The report comes back
in from the Attorney General's office and they said, yeah,
you've got the authority to conduct a full scale investigation.
Now the ropes.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Are off and Wayne didn't waste time.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
So now they have sent me a first office agent
out of Denver, five people out of San Francisco, couple
from Los Angeles. I've got my little group now, maybe
ten people.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The team got right to work.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
I start to develop informants and I'm sending them in
seeing which ones take which ones don't. And I've got
several good informants inside the compound by the first of August.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And in the summer of nineteen eighty four, while Weene
was embedding informants and working to build a case, Matthews
was plotting his next move.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Bob Matthews and his group have decided they're going to
move forward for another armored car robbery, and this one's
going to be the granddaddy of all robberies.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
The target was a Brinks truck that take could be millions.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Unbeknownst to us, Bob has recruited two people that worked
for brinch headquarters. They're giving him all the inside information
he needs. Now. They tell Bob there's a truck heading
up a state pass over near Santa Rosa, California, and
it's right for robbery.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
It was the type of mountain pass where you had
to slow down, so that's exactly where they decided to strike.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Bob pulled together ten people that are real hitters. They
have people stationed along the highway that can announce on
their radio. We passed my point. He is really slowing down,
and they got these various vehicles. Some of them are
up in front of the unit and some of them
behind it, and Bob dispatches them at the right time,
(09:37):
and so they move up. They force the armored truck
on the steep part of the highway off the road,
jump out, fully armed and They blocked the highway from
both directions.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
With rifles aimed and keeping traffic at a standstill. They
lifted a sign into the air and.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
The sign says, get out, up or die. One of
the guys jumps up on the hood of the armored
car and opens fire into the windows, and he's blasting
out the windows. The guys inside the truck are terrified.
They open the doors and they get out and they
lay them on the ground. Now cars are starting to
stack up on the highway, so there's somebody in the
(10:20):
back of the truck that's got to open the door.
It happens it's a woman. She doesn't open the truck door,
and so they open fire on the back windows of
that truck. She opens the door, Bob Matthews jumps inside
and they line up in a caravan. Bob's throwing out
money and they're passing throwing it, and he goes to
the trunk of a car and one guy has got
(10:43):
a stopwatch and he's counting the seconds. Twenty seconds, twenty
five seconds, thirty seconds.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
They plotted every detail down to how many seconds they'd
have before police would arrive. But even precision doesn't always
proven mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Bob's got a pistol shoved into the back of his pants,
and in the process of bending over getting these bags
of money and throwing them out, they're pretty heavy, the
pistol falls out. He doesn't know it. Finally they figure, okay,
that's time, let's go and if billions of dollars left
in the truck. But they got what they could get.
(11:24):
Now they're going to leave.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
They vanished up the mountain road.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
They got three point six million dollars out of that.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Robbery left in their wake or shell casings, a terrified
Brink's crew, and the gun. It didn't take long before
the FBI had it.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
We traced the gun, we find out it was sold
to a guy named Andrew Barnhill, find out everything we
can about him, and we find where he was arrested
in Madrid, Oregon. He had checked into a hotel and
picked up a prostitute and that's how he ended up
getting questioned and arrested. But on his motel receipt he
(12:07):
listed an address in Laclead, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Just an hour north of the compound. Wayne had watched
in Courdeline. His team headed up, but they weren't the
first ones to get there.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The neighbors tell me, well, there was about a dozen
people here just two days ago. They left. They were
there two days before we got there, in that house
fully armed. Had we showed up and they were there,
you could imagine that would have been a terrible gun battle.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Having just missed their suspects. They searched the house where
Wayne found something odd that peaud his interest.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
So I'm searching this place and I find a little
box and it's got Andrew Barnes's most personal stuff in it,
even his baby teeth in an envelope. But on the
bottom of this ste of all this stuff is a
newspaper clipping cut out with scissors, and it's on the
armored car robbery in Seattle Bingo. Now, who's gonna do
(13:12):
that unless it's got real meaning to him? Yep, So
we know we're onto the right path.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
The pieces to this puzzle were all about to come together.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Call everybody together at our headquarters office in Butte, Montana.
We got everybody together. We got a blackboard up there.
The secretary says, when you've got an important call from
the office in Philadelphia and it's FBI agent lou vs
good agent. He had gotten a call from Secret Service.
(13:46):
They just captured a guy passing Bob's counterfeit money. Guy's
name is Tom Martinez.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
And Tom Martinez had a lot to say.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Guy says there's an art organization involved. He's more worried
about what the organization will do to him than what
we could do to him.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
During the interview, Martinez said something that would label this
case forever.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Martinez is a member of a group called The Order.
The Order is a group that was formed by Bob
Matthews based on a book that was written by a
guy named William Pearce. Now, this guy wrote a book
called The Turner Diaries, and Turner Diaries is a fictional
(14:34):
book about a group of guys. They get together and
they form a little army. They want to kill all
the Jews and take over the United States.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
This book became a sacred text for white supremacists to
cross the country. Here's Michael Jensen again.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
The Turner Diaries tells this fictional story of an anti
government group overcoming the tyranny of the US government through
large scale violence.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Fictionally, they manage to do that, and they take over
an air Force space and they're in controllable missile and
eventually they take over the JEdgar Hoover Building in Worston,
d C. And they take over the country, and they
call themselves the Order.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
I think it would be hard to find another contemporary
text that has been more influential among not only the
groups that were active in the late seventies through the
mid nineteen nineties, but that are active today. The Turner
Diaries is still widely read by.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Extremists, and it would become clear that Robert matthews belief
system was modeled after those writings.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
This is his bible. He's doing everything like they do
it in this book, and so far he's dead on
everything he's done. This book is my guide map.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
After that phone call, investigators moved and Tom Martinez became
a cooperator.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Martinez knows everything. He knows locations, places, he knows Bob Matthews,
he knows every member of the Order. He's a gold by.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
The FBI finally knew exactly what it was chasing a
terrorist organization, and now they had an informant inside. But
Bob Matthews was still out there and he had no
intention of stopping. The Order was a group that had
(16:48):
devised a plan for everything including how to evate detection.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
The order is so organized. They have a guy in
their group and he set up a relay for them
where they can make phone calls from their headquarters office
that are not traceable. They would rent a house, put
the phone in the house, and that phone number. They
(17:15):
called it the bear trap. Each of their members, no
matter where they are, have to call this one particular
phone number every day and check in. Then thirty days
later they pull out of that in another house, put
a different phone number in that house, and that's the
bear trap number that's given to everybody.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
But by the fall of nineteen eighty four they had
started to get sloppy. As Wayne tracked their movements, they
would sometimes slip and call house phones instead.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
We found that a number of phone calls were made
to a number in Sandpoint, Idaho. We tracked that number down.
It's registered guy named Jerry Oldboo, and we set up
a ser on this house. After a couple of hours,
a guy walks out of the house and gets on
a motorcycle and I said, you know who that guy is.
(18:09):
I get a photo of him right here. It's Gary Yarborough.
That's not a Jerry Old boob. That's Gary Yarborough.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
The same guy Wayne had spotted in the Spokane armored
truck robbery. And now they watched him drive across the
street to use a payphone, even though there was a
working landline inside.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Why does the guy who's got a perfectly good phone
in his house get on a motorcycle drive two hundred
yards to a payphone and make a phone call. We
got to get a dump off that payphone, so we do,
and I find the number that was called was to
a place in Boise. That's where the counterfeitters are staying.
(18:51):
Right there.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Everything was starting to align, and as he tracked Gary Yarborough,
Wayne's wall of evidence canntinued to grow.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
We found out he had a storage facility in court
a lane. So I got a surreptitious search warrant. It's
a search warrant that allows you to make a surreptitious entry,
search the place and lead so nobody ever knows you searched.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
It surreptitious or a secret. And I can tell you
that getting one of those is definitely not the norm
and harder to obtain.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I searched it and back in the corner I found
a silencer that would fit them back ten.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
The same weapon used to kill Denver talk radio host
Alan Berg.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
I went up inside it. I initial it and dated
it where you'd never see it. I put it back
and backed out.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
It was also becoming clear that Yarborough was getting nervous.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
As surveillances often work, At some point in time, he
must have got suspicious that were following him. He suddenly,
overnight moves out of this house that we've been watching,
and he shows up in a house next to the
National Forest boundary northwest of Standpoint.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The Forest Service confirmed the location. Suddenly things escalated.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
An agent named Mike Johnston drives in there and he's
got two agents with him. What he's trying to do
is just get a look at the place. He drives
very close to the house and Gary Yarborough comes out
with a forty five and opens fire on him.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Luckily, no one was hit. Agents temporarily pulled back. They
returned later that night, but he had slipped away.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Unbeknownst to us, Gary Yarborough was standing outside the house
when they came in on the raid, so he dived
into a ditch and made his way to a place
where he could call anywhere. Bob Matthews had him picked up.
And while we're doing the search in the house, Gary
has escaped.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
But what he left behind was startling.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Inside his house, we find a shrine to Hitler's room
and it's got a huge Nazi flag on the wall,
and then it's got Nazi shoulder and signis and pictures
of Hitler on the walls, and then it's got the
mac tin on a table.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Remember, Matthews had ordered him to get rid of the gun,
but instead Yarborough held onto it as a trophy part
of his twisted shrine.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Well break, So we've got the weapon. We send it
off to the lab and they'll be able to compare
it against the bullets that were recovered from Alan Birch's body.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
While Ween and his team were on the Order's trail,
it's leader, Bob Matthews was staying one step ahead.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Well, Yard Brool gets away, but we've got this valuable
piece of evidence and Matthews has been notified. Sol Matthews
says where it wore.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Matthew's called the counterfeiting house, which unbeknownst to him, had
already been compromised.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
He calls and says abandon the residents immediately take the
printing press, take all the papers, everything, and get out
of there. So they run a U haul trailer and
they put the printing press in the trailer. They take
all the documents and everything, and they abandon the house.
But I got a team of agents watching the house,
(22:39):
and frankly, I want to start taking people down.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Wayne's superior didn't agree.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
He wants to keep the surveillance and the covert activity going.
And I'm thinking it's a big mistake. We've got enough stuff.
It's time to start taking people down and interview it
and examine any evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
The higher ups stood firm, no takedown, not yet.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
So our agents follow the U haul trailer with all
that stuff and they stop and they go into a
hotel to make some phone calls. While they're making a
phone call in a lounge, two guys come in and
sit down at a table relatively close to where they are.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Before agents could move in, the men got nervous and left.
They walked out of the hotel, unhitched the U haul
and drove away. Wayne's men followed but eventually lost them.
The trailer they left behind was seized, and when agents
searched it, they found a gold mine.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
We got a U haul with the printing press and
tons of information. That's very incriminating because this is their
headquarters office.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It was evidence of the orders inner workings, but most
of their members had disappeared, slipping from one safe house
to another. But soon Wayne got his next unexpected break.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
We find another phone call from a payphone. This phone
number is in Troy, Montana. By the time we get there,
the house is abandoned.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
But an unsettling sign was left behind.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
There's a fire pit, and there's a cardboard fixture of
a state trooper on a tree, and it's been all
shot up. So I pick up all the brass on
the ground. Then I go over and I dig some
bullets out of the tree, and I send the bullets
and the casings off the FBI headquarters.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
As they sifted through the fire pit, Wayne and his
team turned up more than just shellcasings. They uncovered another.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Clue, partially burnt piece of paper. It's got an address
on it, So we go to that address. Find out
this is a guy that trains dogs and he identifies
from a photograph. He picks out one of Bruce Carroll
Peers and he says, they've got this big Rottwiler dog
and he left it here for me to train it,
(25:13):
and he gave me six thousand dollars and said he'd
pick it up later. He said, well, do you have
the six thousand? Yeah, I do, and so let me
see it. He brings it to me. It's got wrappers
on it that matched the money stolen out of the
brake truck.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Now there's a break. We got the evidence, and soon
there was even more. The casings recovered from the cardboard
State Trooper target had been analyzed at the lab.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
They come back and say, up, these casings and bullets
were fired from this gun they killed Allenburg. Jeez. So
now we got the gun matching the bullets out of
Allenberg's body, and we got these casings and everything that
we took from Bruce Carrol Pears's house. Everything started to
go together pretty good.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
You know, from money spent at dog Kennel's to ballistics.
The case against the order was getting stronger by the day.
All that was left to do now was catch Matthew's crew,
and the FBI finally caught a break with Tom Martinez,
Wayne's informant.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
In November. Martinez gets a phone call. Bob Matthews says,
I want you to come and join me. Meet me
in Portland. I'll meet you at the airport.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
The FBI made sure Martinez wasn't going on his own.
They booked him a flight, wired the motel, and then
stayed close. But once Matthews showed up, plans changed.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Bob Matthews made him at the airport and he takes
him to his car. Gary Yarborough is in the car
with a rifle, military style rifle. Martinez is scared to
death because he's always been worried about Yarborough, had a
lot of fear of him. They start to driving away
from the airport and he says, here's where I'm staying.
He's got the address that we had set up and everything.
(27:07):
Bob says to him, no, you're not. You're gonna be
staying where we're staying, the Capri Hotel. We're right above
you in room fourteen. That's where you're going. So now
he's panicked because he thinks we don't know where he is.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
As soon as they arrived at the Caprime Hotel, Matthews
took Tom Martinez upstairs to one of the rooms.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
And The room is filled with guns, ammunition, explosives, paperwork
stacked up along the walls, and they begin to make
the pitch to him. You know, you give you one
of us now, and you will never regret this, because
you're going to be a person with a position of importance.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Martinez was panicked, unsure what to do next. He stayed
in his room until that evening, then slipped out to
grab a bite.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
He walks in the cross shop to get something to eat,
and he looks across the counter and he sees one
of the agents that had interviewed him. She passes a
word to him. Everything's Fine's go back to your room,
don't leave again. Just sit tight because everything's gonna come down.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Martinez went back to the motel and waited. The takedown
began before dawn in a corner of northeast Portland. Law
(28:39):
enforcement arrived at the Capri Hotel. Two of the most
wanted domestic terrorists in the country. We're asleep inside.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
The night that they flew in. Our surveillance group picked
them up when they landed at Portland and they rented
a vehicle and then drove to the Capri Hotel.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And as soon as agents touched down. They were preparing
to move in. Here's one of those agents.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
My name is Kenneth Loven Lvin and at the time
I was assigned as a supervisory special Agent with the
FBI to the Portland Division.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Ken was newly assigned to the case.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
I received a call from the supervisor and he briefed
me that there would be a couple of individuals flying
into Portland, Oregon that night. They were a part of
a very dangerous group known as the Order, the White
Supremacist organization.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And now they were in Ken's jurisdiction.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
We observed them check in to the Caprix Hotel. We
made contact with the manager of the Caprix Hotel and
determined that they had a seven am wake up call
the next morning.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
The plan was to wait until morning and then either
intercept them or followed them as they left the motel,
but Matthews had his own plan. At five point thirty am,
he opened his door.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
Robert Matthews stepped out and I had agents dispersed in
various rooms on the second floor of the Capri Hotel.
It was basically dark, and he looked around, went to
the railing overlooking the parking lot, looked for anything that
might be suspicious in his mind, and then he re
entered his room.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Moments later Matthews re emerged.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
He came out again alone, closed the door, started walking
down the gangway. He walked right by a room that
I was in with other agents, and we decided that
when he got a few steps further, we were going
to grab him, take him, and then go over and
approach Yarborough in his room. Well in that noise was
(31:01):
of course created and I was shouting FBI wheese, do
not move, and Robert Matthews immediately gave flight.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Bob jumps over the rails and takes off running down
the street and two agents are following him at a
fast pace.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
He was running as fast as he could run.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
The chase was on. Matthews tore through the neighborhood with
FBI agents close behind.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
The front guy is armed with a handgun. Kenneth Lovin
is carrying a shotgun. They're moving in on Bob.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
I chased him for about four or five blocks. Well,
this time it is becoming just very first light of
the morning.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Bob suddenly makes a turner's about an eight foot wall
that encompasses the yard. He makes a sharp right turn
behind that wall and then button hooks and comes back.
He comes around the corner with a pistol.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
I heard gunfire. The agent yelled out, I have been hit.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
The agent is down.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Fortunately the wound wasn't critical. As Ken got close to
his injured colleague, he suddenly detected movement.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Robert Matthews had been hiding behind a large cement wall
covered with ivy. All I could see is one hand
with a handgun in it. He was about to shoot
again at my fellow agent, and I yelled, and at
that he cranked off either two or three rounds at me.
I then returned fire with my shotgun, basically blowing off
(32:44):
his right hand.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
But even that didn't stop him.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Matthews turns and runs. Kenneth gives aid and support to
the wounded agent.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
He wasn't bleeding profusely. He wasn't in a life threatening situation.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Bob flags down a car. His hand is bleeding and
he tells the guy, I caught my hand and the
fan belt in my car. Can you get me to
a hospital? And the guy says, yeah, jump in.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
And that's where he was last seen by anybody that
we could identify.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And just like that, A bleeding but very much alive
Bob Matthews disappeared into the cloudy Portland terrain. For the FBI,
this manhunt was only just beginning. Agents fanned out in
canvass the surrounding area, and when they questioned a local
gas station clerk.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
The gas station attendant said he had severely injured himself.
There was blood all over the paper towels, and he
seemed to be an excruciating pain. He approached a couple
and they were en route to Mount Hood's ski facility.
Matthews asked him if they would be kind enough to
give him a ride up the road, and he said,
if you'll let me out, I'll go to my house
(33:59):
and I'll get some assistance. And they gave him a
ride for about four or five miles. He finally said,
my home is just off the highway here a short
distance back in the trees. So the Good Samaritans lay
out and that was the last they saw.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Of Matthews had once again slipped through the FBI's fingers,
but they kept moving in getting closer each time. They
found the couple by tracing their credit card and began
to scour the mountain and we.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
Spent hours and hours and hours. We stayed in that
neighborhood for the rest of the night, and the next
day we found a cabin type home that we saw
a couple vehicles go in and out during the day
and always was males, not couples, and so we began
to focus our attention on one home in that area
that we thought could be what we were looking for.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
And as they watched the cabin, a white pickup truck
pulled out of the driveway.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
We had an air surveillance as well his ground surveillance
on that vehicle. We followed it for probably forty miles.
We decided that we would try to make a car stop,
but before we could get our vehicles in a position,
he exited the interstate and started going down dirt roads.
He had obviously made the surveillance and was trying to
(35:20):
shake us, so I lit him up with the lights
and he stopped. We determined very quickly he was a
member of the klu Klux Klan. There was a warrant
for him, and we had a sought off shotgun in
the back of his pickup.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Ken and his team brought in the driver and by
later that night they'd struck a deal.
Speaker 4 (35:42):
He would provide us how many people and who all
they were by name, and that they had gone up
to the Seattle area. He was to make contact the
next morning, to be taken later that afternoon to a
place out on Woodbey Island.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
We'd be Island is a remote area of coastline north
of Seattle, Washington, and now the likely refuge of an
armed separatist preparing for battle. Bob Matthews had been ready
in his troops.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
He pulls them all together and he tells them we
are now in a full state of war. Our demand
of Congress is going to be that they give us
five Northwestern states which will be under our care, control
and custody. These will no longer be states of the
United States of America, and that we demand this or
(36:37):
there's going to be massy chaos, massive loss of life.
Because we have a plan.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
For days, the house on would Be Islands sat under
Federal watch agents observed from tree lines, Coastguard patrols sealed
off the water.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
The FBI's hostage rescue team from Washington, DC took charge
of the whole scene. Or two and a half three
more days just surveilling that house and making sure that
no one came out that wasn't apprehended.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And one by one, members of the order were arrested.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Slowly but surely. We picked off the group one or
two at a time as they would go to maybe
get groceries or supplies, and we would stop them and
arrest them. So I'm sure that that became a clue
to Robert Matthews that once you leave here, they were
being picked off by law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Until only one man remained.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Bob Matthews will not surrender, he refuses.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Hostage negotiators tried to get him to leave the house,
but were unsuccessful. As night fell, the lead negotiator decided
it was time to switch tactics.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Turns to me. He says, Wayne, there's no hostage anymore,
so I can't stay here and Bob will not surrender.
So it's decided that we will employ swap teams try
to get about.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
They converged from all over.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
We had swapped teams from Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Salt Lake City, Denver, and Butte, which was the swap
team I.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Was on, and we had the house completely surrounded with
the exception of the back of the house because you
had to walk no further than maybe ten or twelve steps,
and it was about a two hundred foot drop off
right down to the shoreline of Puget Sound, So we
were not concerned that anyone could come out of that
and escape.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
The FBI began to move in.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
We deployed tear gas for over an hour, and we
saw our detective no movement, no sounds of him moving
around or anything. Then we decided we would elevate to
a higher concentration and more volume of tear gas was
then administered within the residence. That went on for period
of two two and a half.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Hours, but Matthews didn't come out. So they next sent
canine officers and their dogs into the house.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
And the dog supposedly could handle tear gas and was
not affected by it. The owner stayed on the main
floor and the dog went through every room up in
the house and did not react to any type of
human presence or someone that was alive. That made us
believe that Matthews might have succumbed to excessive tear gas.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
And SWAT took it from there.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
One agent throws a flash bang and grenade through a
window into the ground floor. It's a type of thing
that's got such a shock value that people actually just freeze.
And the team goes in through the front door, and
I ducked the windows out on the side guindow, so
I've got them covered as they're going in.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Then just as they entered the ground floor.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Robert Matthews opened up with an AR fifteen and shot
through the floor down into the main floor of the home.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
At that point, I had made some racket and Bob
Matthews knew where I was because he could hear the noise,
so he opened fire on me, and I took about
five or ten rounds just inches above my head. Debris
fell on top of the wool hat I was wearing
where the bullets passed through.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
All we could do was try and take cover.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
We can't shoot because we don't have a target. That's
an FBI premise. You might be able to see what
you're shooting at. He can't shoot it a sound, but
he was shooting that sounds. Then another agent off to
the left of me, about fifteen feet inside the house
in the corner. He ran across the house to the
other side. When he did that made a noise, and
(40:55):
Bob opened up and took out that corner where he'd
been standing.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Agents scrambled to shield themselves from the barrage of gunfire
as they strategized their next move.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Fortunately, no agents were hit and they immediately vacated the house, so.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
We pulled out went back into the woods to make
another ploy as it got dark that night.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Matthews had military training, heavy weapons and showed every sign
he'd fight to the death, but that wouldn't stop the agents.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Darkness came and we decided to bring helicopters in.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
The helicopter flew out over Puget Sound and illuminated the
rear of the house with a huge ten thousand kindlepower spotlight.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Helicopters are very frightening when they sit right down on
top of you. That's what we did, set them right
down on top of the roof, blowing shingles off the roof.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
But even the helicopters did work.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
Matthews opened up on the helicopter with his AR fifteen.
Helicopter immediately left the area.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Then he turned his rifle back towards the ground.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Bob went over and he opened fire on the team
on the west side of the building. They fired back
I'm standing in a little patch of trees. He must
have had night vision equipment. He opens up on me
from the upstairs went down, bulletsters slapping into the trees
around me, and I've got an MPK five, fully automatic,
(42:37):
so I open up into his muzzle fire, firing bursts
of five rounds, and he's doing about the same. And
I can't figure out why he's not down because I
was a very good shot and I was shooting directly
into his muzzle blasts. But I found out he did
have body armor. He was probably hurt, but we were
killing him. They fired the flare into the house to
(43:00):
light up the bottom of the house so we could
see if he went downstairs.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
That caused a fire, and it was spreading quickly, and.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
We're standing there twenty yards apart, just firing back and forth,
fire burning in a house down below. Then the fire
reaches the upstairs area, and I can hear rounds being
popped off, because that's what they do when fire gets
to them. The realms explode, the bullets go somewhere, and
it sounded like there were a thousand or more bullets
(43:32):
going every witch direction until eventually it was just quiet,
and I stood there.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Bob Matthews never came out of that house.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And the cabin burned, burned, burned to the ground. And
I stood there all night with my rifle shouldered, and
then at first daylight I walked forward and when I
got to the cabin, there at the edge of the
foundation was re forced iron tobb ceramic inside that had
fallen from the upstairs floor to the ground stairs floor,
(44:07):
and Bob's body was inside it.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
He had submerged himself in a bathtub using a straw
like device to breathe air, but it cooked him live.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
The manhunt was officially over here again, his former special
agent Ken Lovin.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
I don't think I've ever done anything. I don't believe
anyone else had. For that duration of time twenty four
to seven that we were literally on edge and we
knew that any mishap somebody would be killed at any
given time was extremely high tension.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
For Wayne too. It was complicated.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
It was a really mixed emotion thing. I was glad
there was no probability that he was going to kill
one of us. I was sad that he didn't just surrender,
and I could have sat down and had an opportunity
to question him to have all my questions answered that
only he could answer.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Once the fire went cold, they just packed up and
moved on.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
That's the way it is. There was no downtime, no
vacation time, There was nothing. When this one was over,
we went right back into the next biggest fish that
we could catch.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
But Bob Matthews and all the hate and danger he
represented stayed with them. Without their leader, would the order survive.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
They were dedicated to him, but they weren't committed to
the cause. Bob was committed to the cause. They used
to tell an old joke. They'd say that when you
sit down to breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken
they gave you those eggs was dedicated. The hog they
(45:58):
gave you that ham was committed. Bob was committed.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Bob Matthews was dead, but his cause and his followers
didn't die with him, and neither did the threat.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
They had an organization of people that were counterfeiting Robin banks,
cash couriers, armored car trucks. They did assassinations, they did bombings,
and when you think about it, that's a rarity you
seldom come across an organization that crosses so many criminal lines.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
And no one had yet been held accountable for Allenberg's murder.
The man who was believed to have pulled the trigger,
Bruce Carrol Pearce, was still out there and he was
Wayne's next target. That opportunity came when Pierce was arrested
in Atlanta. Wayne went down to interview.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
Him, and he admitted to every crime that he and
the others had committed.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Pierce confessed to armored car robberies, the counterfeiting operation, and
his key role in the Order's violent campaign, but he
stopped short when it came to Allenberg's murder.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
I knew that he was the trigger man. He said, Well,
let me ask you. If a man was the trigger man,
and that man confessed and cooperated in the trial, could
that man be guaranteed that he wouldn't get the death penalty?
And the only thing I could tell him was I said,
(47:36):
in that scenario, I would take the cooperation to the
United States attorney, who can take it to the federal
judge and a decision can be made. But I can't
make that promise, And he said, I want a lawyer
before we discussed the Allenburg matter.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
That's where the converse station ended. But the case against
the Order now began that September in Seattle. In nineteen
eighty five, ten Order members stood trial together in what
became the government's sweeping RICO case against the group. Alan
Berg's murder became a part of that case.
Speaker 8 (48:20):
The Denver murderers was included in the indictment as murder
under the Denver statutes. And you're allowed to do that
under RICO because it incorporates that crime as part of
a pattern of racketeering activities. So they weren't charged separately
with the murder, I mean in a separate murder trial.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
That's Gene Wilson, the federal prosecutor who tried the Order.
All the various crimes were presented together as pieces of
the overall conspiracy.
Speaker 8 (48:54):
The evidence was pretty blatant. There's, of course the Burg murder.
There were various are on robberies. There was transporting property
across state lines, which is a federal crime covered in RICO.
There was counterfeiting. We were fairly confident going into it
that some of the crimes that they had committed were
(49:15):
so horrible that the jury would be very likely to
find them guilty.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
And they did. Bruce Carroll Pierce was convicted on racketeering
and conspiracy charges. He was sentenced to two hundred and
fifty two years. David Lane received one hundred and ninety.
Gary Yarborough got eighty five. Seven other members of the
order were also convicted and received decades long terms. The
(49:44):
actual case of Allenberg's murder stayed in state hands, and
after the federal convictions, that case was never tried.
Speaker 8 (49:53):
They got so much of a sentence in this case
a Denver local attorneys and US attorneys, that was probably
not necessary to do that.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
In the eyes of many, overall justice had been served.
But to those who knew Alan, like his close friend
Peter Boyles, something had been left unresolved.
Speaker 5 (50:16):
No one ever stood trial for the murder of allen Burg,
No one ever did. I was so angry. That's stupid,
racist bastards could kill that gun. I was stunned by that.
That was when I was sitting in this federal courtroom
looking thinking, look at you, like these were just losers
(50:36):
everyone else.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
The verdict affected people differently. For some, it stirred frustration.
For others, like Wayne Mannis, it marked the end of
a relentless pursuit. But he knows the fight is still
far from over.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
It was the most significant verdict of my career. But
I knew in my heart, I knew it's not over.
There's thousands of people that feel the same way that
these people do, and all it would take is just
a spark and the fuel from a charismatic leader to
(51:16):
reignite it and be part back again. And I feel
that way today.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
The true threat is the ideology, and Wayne knows if
history is any indication that ideology didn't die in the
courtroom in the eyes of the order. They were waging
a rightful war against the government, but at its root
was hate and bigotry, and it was a war that
(51:42):
left very real victims like alan Berg.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
When I say it changed everything in my life, it
changed everything. I mean, it was still radio. It was fun,
it was a kick and he asked. We had a
great time, but it was there was a hole in
my soul that he wasn't there years ago.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
I'm eighty one.
Speaker 5 (52:01):
Now you know he's part of the mist. Now he's
part of the legacy of what happened.
Speaker 9 (52:09):
I don't think I'm anything but alan Berg. I refuse
to accept the label. There's nothing connected with my whole
life that represents labels none. In fact, the fact that
I've been in this ten years, with my style, my
outspoken behavior, and some very difficult times that I've gone through,
I feel blessed that I had ten years of this.
If I never worked another day, I'm a very lucky
man to have been able to do what I do
(52:31):
is my truth.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Alan Berg was a voice that cut through the noise,
and for some that made him dangerous, for others unforgettable.
Speaker 6 (52:43):
Alan Berg was a purveyor of words, was a purveyor
of ideas. You can't kill words, and you can't kill ideas.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
The order may have been dismantled, Bob Matthews may have
gone downs, but the bigotry didn't die with them. In
the years to come, that ideology would inspire new enemies,
driven by a different cause, but fueled by the same beliefs.
But in the shadows, another group driven by hate was
(53:17):
about to strike Manhattan.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Next time on Law and Order, criminal justice system.
Speaker 3 (53:34):
I felt the whole building heave, It actually lifted.
Speaker 6 (53:38):
One of the first things I saw was a crater
at one hundred and twenty some feet in diameter. There
was a litany of more serious injuries, cardiac arrests, concussion injuries,
trauma from the explosion itself, plus fractured and broken bones.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Actually saw a ripple go across the Hudson River.
Speaker 5 (53:56):
They located the VIN number off the writer's rock that
was used in the bombing and the rest of the case.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Blossomed Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production
of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna
Sega Nicolaze. The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive
produced by Dick Wolf Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at
(54:25):
Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor
Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and
producer Jesse Funk. This season is executive produced by Anna
Sega Nicolazi. Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage.
(54:46):
Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.
Original music by John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post
with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over
me Steve Zernkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New
York for providing archival material for the show. For more
(55:09):
podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks
for listening.
You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. This episode contains
discussions of sensitive topics including violence, hate, crimes, and the
use of discriminatory language and slurs. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
In the criminal justice system, landmark trials transcend the courtroom
to reshape the law. The brave many women who investigate
and prosecute these cases are part of a select group
that is defined American history. These are their stories. December eighth,
nineteen eighty four, would be Island, Washington.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
The high speed pursuit for Allenburg's killers didn't end on
a highway. It led to a bluff above Puget Sound,
where a two story cabin sat silent in the dark,
But it wasn't empty.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Bob Matthews will not surrender, he refuses.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
He was armed, cornered and waiting.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Darkness came. We decided to bring helicopters in.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
The choppers dropped low, the thump of their rotor blades
cracked against the tree tops.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Set them right down on top of the roof of
Blowing shingles off the roof.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
The helicopter illuminated the rear of the house with a
huge ten thousand kindlepower spotlight.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
It was meant to flush Matthews out and enable a
safe arrest, but he had other plans.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Matthews opened up on the helicopter with a AR fifteen.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
The battle had just begun.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
I got a call, get out to LaGuardia Airport.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
There's been a bombing.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
There was a thirty two foot crater in front of
what was left of the building.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I was trying to figure out, Am I dead?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Am I alive? Where am I?
Speaker 1 (02:13):
I'm Aniseega Nicolazzi.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
That's why terrorism works.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
It doesn't care who you are.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order,
criminal justice system. The nineteen eighty four killing of Denver
talk radio host Alan Berg had all the hallmarks of
a targeted hit. Was it someone he defended on his
(02:39):
show or was it part of something even bigger and
more dangerous for law enforcement to get from suspicion to
a courtroom that would take evidence and in the weeks
after the shooting, FBI Special Agent Wayne Mannis started to
collect what he needed.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I am preparing to get a wealth of information out
of the area. In Congress at the Area Nations Compound
July nineteen eighty four. Larry and the police department over
and Spokane. They've got some informants they're going to send
in and I'll get privy for what's happening.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
It was one of the largest annual gatherings of white
supremacists in the country. Wayne had been tracking them for months,
but still didn't have the green light to do more.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
I complete this report to get authorization for a full
scale investigation near the end of June, and I send
it off. We go through the Aryan Compound in July
and I still don't have authorization to do anything.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
All Wayne could do was watch and listen. But from
the sidelines, Wayne saw something percolating that caught his attention.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
There was a guy that gave speeches there, a real
charismatic and his name was Lewis Beam. Lewis Beam was
a member of the k Clarks Klan out of Texas
and former Vietnam guy. He was a machine gunner, so
he has training and a lot of experience.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But it wasn't Beam's combat record that made him dangerous.
It was his ideas. Here again is terrorism researcher Michael Jensen.
Speaker 7 (04:24):
Beam was able to articulate a set of tactical ideas
that became a key feature of the organization. One of
the most important foundational ideas in this movement is the
idea of leaderless resistance.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Beam was more than another loud voice at the podium.
He was shaping the white supremacist playbook.
Speaker 7 (04:46):
What Beam did was really to promote this idea that
anyone in everyone could get involved in the movement. Don't
wait for someone to come to you, start your own militia.
As long as everyone agrees on the ideology and the
tactics that they're willing to use, the movement will survive. Ultimately,
(05:07):
what he wrote about leaderless resistance became a foundational belief
for the movement.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
And by the time of the Aryan Congress, Beam had
been brought into the fold by one of the very
men Wain was watching, Robert Matthews.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Unbeknownst to me, he's one of the guys that Bob
has recruited as an Aryan warrior during the time of
the aria In Congress, this guy's given us speech and
he says, we've already eliminated one of the most prominent
obnoxious Jews in our society. And of course I know
alan Berg has been killed, so what are you going
(05:47):
to think? That's what I'm thinking. This guy is saying
we have done this.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
This was more than just rhetoric. It was an admission.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So I called repde and I said, I'm wondering about
this guy Lewis Beam. They said, well, we don't know
about him, but we got a suspect. And the suspect
is David Lane, who had a long and heated conversation
with him, and Alan Bert just absolutely slaughtered him in
the conversation. We think maybe David Lane. So he says,
(06:23):
maybe you guys could take it up, and I said, yeah,
you bet we will.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Now wein had a name and an idea allen Berg's
murder might not be an isolated act of violence, but
potentially part of a much larger conspiracy and.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Kind of read into what my thought process was at
that time. All this criminal stuff is happening, and in
my mind, I'm pushing it all into one group people. Yep.
Can I prove it? No, I can't prove it, but.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It's but you're starting to see it. You're starting to
figure it out, like each spoke and how you're.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Going to go after them exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Wayne had had a partial view, but now could see
the entire wheel. Its spokes were made up of white
supremacists and potential killers. The center was Bob Matthews. For weeks,
Wayne had been circling Matthew's group. He had informants at
Aryan nations, He had names and locations, but what he
(07:23):
didn't have was permission to chase down either. That changed
in early August.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
After their annual area in Congress. The report comes back
in from the Attorney General's office and they said, yeah,
you've got the authority to conduct a full scale investigation.
Now the ropes.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Are off and Wayne didn't waste time.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
So now they have sent me a first office agent
out of Denver, five people out of San Francisco, couple
from Los Angeles. I've got my little group now, maybe
ten people.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The team got right to work.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
I start to develop informants and I'm sending them in
seeing which ones take which ones don't. And I've got
several good informants inside the compound by the first of August.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And in the summer of nineteen eighty four, while Weene
was embedding informants and working to build a case, Matthews
was plotting his next move.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Bob Matthews and his group have decided they're going to
move forward for another armored car robbery, and this one's
going to be the granddaddy of all robberies.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
The target was a Brinks truck that take could be millions.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Unbeknownst to us, Bob has recruited two people that worked
for brinch headquarters. They're giving him all the inside information
he needs. Now. They tell Bob there's a truck heading
up a state pass over near Santa Rosa, California, and
it's right for robbery.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
It was the type of mountain pass where you had
to slow down, so that's exactly where they decided to strike.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Bob pulled together ten people that are real hitters. They
have people stationed along the highway that can announce on
their radio. We passed my point. He is really slowing down,
and they got these various vehicles. Some of them are
up in front of the unit and some of them
behind it, and Bob dispatches them at the right time,
(09:37):
and so they move up. They force the armored truck
on the steep part of the highway off the road,
jump out, fully armed and They blocked the highway from
both directions.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
With rifles aimed and keeping traffic at a standstill. They
lifted a sign into the air and.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
The sign says, get out, up or die. One of
the guys jumps up on the hood of the armored
car and opens fire into the windows, and he's blasting
out the windows. The guys inside the truck are terrified.
They open the doors and they get out and they
lay them on the ground. Now cars are starting to
stack up on the highway, so there's somebody in the
(10:20):
back of the truck that's got to open the door.
It happens it's a woman. She doesn't open the truck door,
and so they open fire on the back windows of
that truck. She opens the door, Bob Matthews jumps inside
and they line up in a caravan. Bob's throwing out
money and they're passing throwing it, and he goes to
the trunk of a car and one guy has got
(10:43):
a stopwatch and he's counting the seconds. Twenty seconds, twenty
five seconds, thirty seconds.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
They plotted every detail down to how many seconds they'd
have before police would arrive. But even precision doesn't always
proven mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Bob's got a pistol shoved into the back of his pants,
and in the process of bending over getting these bags
of money and throwing them out, they're pretty heavy, the
pistol falls out. He doesn't know it. Finally they figure, okay,
that's time, let's go and if billions of dollars left
in the truck. But they got what they could get.
(11:24):
Now they're going to leave.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
They vanished up the mountain road.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
They got three point six million dollars out of that.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Robbery left in their wake or shell casings, a terrified
Brink's crew, and the gun. It didn't take long before
the FBI had it.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
We traced the gun, we find out it was sold
to a guy named Andrew Barnhill, find out everything we
can about him, and we find where he was arrested
in Madrid, Oregon. He had checked into a hotel and
picked up a prostitute and that's how he ended up
getting questioned and arrested. But on his motel receipt he
(12:07):
listed an address in Laclead, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Just an hour north of the compound. Wayne had watched
in Courdeline. His team headed up, but they weren't the
first ones to get there.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The neighbors tell me, well, there was about a dozen
people here just two days ago. They left. They were
there two days before we got there, in that house
fully armed. Had we showed up and they were there,
you could imagine that would have been a terrible gun battle.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Having just missed their suspects. They searched the house where
Wayne found something odd that peaud his interest.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
So I'm searching this place and I find a little
box and it's got Andrew Barnes's most personal stuff in it,
even his baby teeth in an envelope. But on the
bottom of this ste of all this stuff is a
newspaper clipping cut out with scissors, and it's on the
armored car robbery in Seattle Bingo. Now, who's gonna do
(13:12):
that unless it's got real meaning to him? Yep, So
we know we're onto the right path.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
The pieces to this puzzle were all about to come together.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Call everybody together at our headquarters office in Butte, Montana.
We got everybody together. We got a blackboard up there.
The secretary says, when you've got an important call from
the office in Philadelphia and it's FBI agent lou vs
good agent. He had gotten a call from Secret Service.
(13:46):
They just captured a guy passing Bob's counterfeit money. Guy's
name is Tom Martinez.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
And Tom Martinez had a lot to say.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Guy says there's an art organization involved. He's more worried
about what the organization will do to him than what
we could do to him.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
During the interview, Martinez said something that would label this
case forever.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Martinez is a member of a group called The Order.
The Order is a group that was formed by Bob
Matthews based on a book that was written by a
guy named William Pearce. Now, this guy wrote a book
called The Turner Diaries, and Turner Diaries is a fictional
(14:34):
book about a group of guys. They get together and
they form a little army. They want to kill all
the Jews and take over the United States.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
This book became a sacred text for white supremacists to
cross the country. Here's Michael Jensen again.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
The Turner Diaries tells this fictional story of an anti
government group overcoming the tyranny of the US government through
large scale violence.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Fictionally, they manage to do that, and they take over
an air Force space and they're in controllable missile and
eventually they take over the JEdgar Hoover Building in Worston,
d C. And they take over the country, and they
call themselves the Order.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
I think it would be hard to find another contemporary
text that has been more influential among not only the
groups that were active in the late seventies through the
mid nineteen nineties, but that are active today. The Turner
Diaries is still widely read by.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Extremists, and it would become clear that Robert matthews belief
system was modeled after those writings.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
This is his bible. He's doing everything like they do
it in this book, and so far he's dead on
everything he's done. This book is my guide map.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
After that phone call, investigators moved and Tom Martinez became
a cooperator.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Martinez knows everything. He knows locations, places, he knows Bob Matthews,
he knows every member of the Order. He's a gold by.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
The FBI finally knew exactly what it was chasing a
terrorist organization, and now they had an informant inside. But
Bob Matthews was still out there and he had no
intention of stopping. The Order was a group that had
(16:48):
devised a plan for everything including how to evate detection.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
The order is so organized. They have a guy in
their group and he set up a relay for them
where they can make phone calls from their headquarters office
that are not traceable. They would rent a house, put
the phone in the house, and that phone number. They
(17:15):
called it the bear trap. Each of their members, no
matter where they are, have to call this one particular
phone number every day and check in. Then thirty days
later they pull out of that in another house, put
a different phone number in that house, and that's the
bear trap number that's given to everybody.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
But by the fall of nineteen eighty four they had
started to get sloppy. As Wayne tracked their movements, they
would sometimes slip and call house phones instead.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
We found that a number of phone calls were made
to a number in Sandpoint, Idaho. We tracked that number down.
It's registered guy named Jerry Oldboo, and we set up
a ser on this house. After a couple of hours,
a guy walks out of the house and gets on
a motorcycle and I said, you know who that guy is.
(18:09):
I get a photo of him right here. It's Gary Yarborough.
That's not a Jerry Old boob. That's Gary Yarborough.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
The same guy Wayne had spotted in the Spokane armored
truck robbery. And now they watched him drive across the
street to use a payphone, even though there was a
working landline inside.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Why does the guy who's got a perfectly good phone
in his house get on a motorcycle drive two hundred
yards to a payphone and make a phone call. We
got to get a dump off that payphone, so we do,
and I find the number that was called was to
a place in Boise. That's where the counterfeitters are staying.
(18:51):
Right there.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Everything was starting to align, and as he tracked Gary Yarborough,
Wayne's wall of evidence canntinued to grow.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
We found out he had a storage facility in court
a lane. So I got a surreptitious search warrant. It's
a search warrant that allows you to make a surreptitious entry,
search the place and lead so nobody ever knows you searched.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
It surreptitious or a secret. And I can tell you
that getting one of those is definitely not the norm
and harder to obtain.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I searched it and back in the corner I found
a silencer that would fit them back ten.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
The same weapon used to kill Denver talk radio host
Alan Berg.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
I went up inside it. I initial it and dated
it where you'd never see it. I put it back
and backed out.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
It was also becoming clear that Yarborough was getting nervous.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
As surveillances often work, At some point in time, he
must have got suspicious that were following him. He suddenly,
overnight moves out of this house that we've been watching,
and he shows up in a house next to the
National Forest boundary northwest of Standpoint.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The Forest Service confirmed the location. Suddenly things escalated.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
An agent named Mike Johnston drives in there and he's
got two agents with him. What he's trying to do
is just get a look at the place. He drives
very close to the house and Gary Yarborough comes out
with a forty five and opens fire on him.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Luckily, no one was hit. Agents temporarily pulled back. They
returned later that night, but he had slipped away.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Unbeknownst to us, Gary Yarborough was standing outside the house
when they came in on the raid, so he dived
into a ditch and made his way to a place
where he could call anywhere. Bob Matthews had him picked up.
And while we're doing the search in the house, Gary
has escaped.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
But what he left behind was startling.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Inside his house, we find a shrine to Hitler's room
and it's got a huge Nazi flag on the wall,
and then it's got Nazi shoulder and signis and pictures
of Hitler on the walls, and then it's got the
mac tin on a table.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Remember, Matthews had ordered him to get rid of the gun,
but instead Yarborough held onto it as a trophy part
of his twisted shrine.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Well break, So we've got the weapon. We send it
off to the lab and they'll be able to compare
it against the bullets that were recovered from Alan Birch's body.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
While Ween and his team were on the Order's trail,
it's leader, Bob Matthews was staying one step ahead.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Well, Yard Brool gets away, but we've got this valuable
piece of evidence and Matthews has been notified. Sol Matthews
says where it wore.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Matthew's called the counterfeiting house, which unbeknownst to him, had
already been compromised.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
He calls and says abandon the residents immediately take the
printing press, take all the papers, everything, and get out
of there. So they run a U haul trailer and
they put the printing press in the trailer. They take
all the documents and everything, and they abandon the house.
But I got a team of agents watching the house,
(22:39):
and frankly, I want to start taking people down.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Wayne's superior didn't agree.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
He wants to keep the surveillance and the covert activity going.
And I'm thinking it's a big mistake. We've got enough stuff.
It's time to start taking people down and interview it
and examine any evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
The higher ups stood firm, no takedown, not yet.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
So our agents follow the U haul trailer with all
that stuff and they stop and they go into a
hotel to make some phone calls. While they're making a
phone call in a lounge, two guys come in and
sit down at a table relatively close to where they are.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Before agents could move in, the men got nervous and left.
They walked out of the hotel, unhitched the U haul
and drove away. Wayne's men followed but eventually lost them.
The trailer they left behind was seized, and when agents
searched it, they found a gold mine.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
We got a U haul with the printing press and
tons of information. That's very incriminating because this is their
headquarters office.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It was evidence of the orders inner workings, but most
of their members had disappeared, slipping from one safe house
to another. But soon Wayne got his next unexpected break.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
We find another phone call from a payphone. This phone
number is in Troy, Montana. By the time we get there,
the house is abandoned.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
But an unsettling sign was left behind.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
There's a fire pit, and there's a cardboard fixture of
a state trooper on a tree, and it's been all
shot up. So I pick up all the brass on
the ground. Then I go over and I dig some
bullets out of the tree, and I send the bullets
and the casings off the FBI headquarters.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
As they sifted through the fire pit, Wayne and his
team turned up more than just shellcasings. They uncovered another.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Clue, partially burnt piece of paper. It's got an address
on it, So we go to that address. Find out
this is a guy that trains dogs and he identifies
from a photograph. He picks out one of Bruce Carroll
Peers and he says, they've got this big Rottwiler dog
and he left it here for me to train it,
(25:13):
and he gave me six thousand dollars and said he'd
pick it up later. He said, well, do you have
the six thousand? Yeah, I do, and so let me
see it. He brings it to me. It's got wrappers
on it that matched the money stolen out of the
brake truck.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Now there's a break. We got the evidence, and soon
there was even more. The casings recovered from the cardboard
State Trooper target had been analyzed at the lab.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
They come back and say, up, these casings and bullets
were fired from this gun they killed Allenburg. Jeez. So
now we got the gun matching the bullets out of
Allenberg's body, and we got these casings and everything that
we took from Bruce Carrol Pears's house. Everything started to
go together pretty good.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
You know, from money spent at dog Kennel's to ballistics.
The case against the order was getting stronger by the day.
All that was left to do now was catch Matthew's crew,
and the FBI finally caught a break with Tom Martinez,
Wayne's informant.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
In November. Martinez gets a phone call. Bob Matthews says,
I want you to come and join me. Meet me
in Portland. I'll meet you at the airport.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
The FBI made sure Martinez wasn't going on his own.
They booked him a flight, wired the motel, and then
stayed close. But once Matthews showed up, plans changed.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Bob Matthews made him at the airport and he takes
him to his car. Gary Yarborough is in the car
with a rifle, military style rifle. Martinez is scared to
death because he's always been worried about Yarborough, had a
lot of fear of him. They start to driving away
from the airport and he says, here's where I'm staying.
He's got the address that we had set up and everything.
(27:07):
Bob says to him, no, you're not. You're gonna be
staying where we're staying, the Capri Hotel. We're right above
you in room fourteen. That's where you're going. So now
he's panicked because he thinks we don't know where he is.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
As soon as they arrived at the Caprime Hotel, Matthews
took Tom Martinez upstairs to one of the rooms.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
And The room is filled with guns, ammunition, explosives, paperwork
stacked up along the walls, and they begin to make
the pitch to him. You know, you give you one
of us now, and you will never regret this, because
you're going to be a person with a position of importance.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Martinez was panicked, unsure what to do next. He stayed
in his room until that evening, then slipped out to
grab a bite.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
He walks in the cross shop to get something to eat,
and he looks across the counter and he sees one
of the agents that had interviewed him. She passes a
word to him. Everything's Fine's go back to your room,
don't leave again. Just sit tight because everything's gonna come down.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Martinez went back to the motel and waited. The takedown
began before dawn in a corner of northeast Portland. Law
(28:39):
enforcement arrived at the Capri Hotel. Two of the most
wanted domestic terrorists in the country. We're asleep inside.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
The night that they flew in. Our surveillance group picked
them up when they landed at Portland and they rented
a vehicle and then drove to the Capri Hotel.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And as soon as agents touched down. They were preparing
to move in. Here's one of those agents.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
My name is Kenneth Loven Lvin and at the time
I was assigned as a supervisory special Agent with the
FBI to the Portland Division.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Ken was newly assigned to the case.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
I received a call from the supervisor and he briefed
me that there would be a couple of individuals flying
into Portland, Oregon that night. They were a part of
a very dangerous group known as the Order, the White
Supremacist organization.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And now they were in Ken's jurisdiction.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
We observed them check in to the Caprix Hotel. We
made contact with the manager of the Caprix Hotel and
determined that they had a seven am wake up call
the next morning.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
The plan was to wait until morning and then either
intercept them or followed them as they left the motel,
but Matthews had his own plan. At five point thirty am,
he opened his door.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
Robert Matthews stepped out and I had agents dispersed in
various rooms on the second floor of the Capri Hotel.
It was basically dark, and he looked around, went to
the railing overlooking the parking lot, looked for anything that
might be suspicious in his mind, and then he re
entered his room.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Moments later Matthews re emerged.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
He came out again alone, closed the door, started walking
down the gangway. He walked right by a room that
I was in with other agents, and we decided that
when he got a few steps further, we were going
to grab him, take him, and then go over and
approach Yarborough in his room. Well in that noise was
(31:01):
of course created and I was shouting FBI wheese, do
not move, and Robert Matthews immediately gave flight.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Bob jumps over the rails and takes off running down
the street and two agents are following him at a
fast pace.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
He was running as fast as he could run.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
The chase was on. Matthews tore through the neighborhood with
FBI agents close behind.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
The front guy is armed with a handgun. Kenneth Lovin
is carrying a shotgun. They're moving in on Bob.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
I chased him for about four or five blocks. Well,
this time it is becoming just very first light of
the morning.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Bob suddenly makes a turner's about an eight foot wall
that encompasses the yard. He makes a sharp right turn
behind that wall and then button hooks and comes back.
He comes around the corner with a pistol.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
I heard gunfire. The agent yelled out, I have been hit.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
The agent is down.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Fortunately the wound wasn't critical. As Ken got close to
his injured colleague, he suddenly detected movement.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Robert Matthews had been hiding behind a large cement wall
covered with ivy. All I could see is one hand
with a handgun in it. He was about to shoot
again at my fellow agent, and I yelled, and at
that he cranked off either two or three rounds at me.
I then returned fire with my shotgun, basically blowing off
(32:44):
his right hand.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
But even that didn't stop him.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Matthews turns and runs. Kenneth gives aid and support to
the wounded agent.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
He wasn't bleeding profusely. He wasn't in a life threatening situation.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Bob flags down a car. His hand is bleeding and
he tells the guy, I caught my hand and the
fan belt in my car. Can you get me to
a hospital? And the guy says, yeah, jump in.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
And that's where he was last seen by anybody that
we could identify.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And just like that, A bleeding but very much alive
Bob Matthews disappeared into the cloudy Portland terrain. For the FBI,
this manhunt was only just beginning. Agents fanned out in
canvass the surrounding area, and when they questioned a local
gas station clerk.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
The gas station attendant said he had severely injured himself.
There was blood all over the paper towels, and he
seemed to be an excruciating pain. He approached a couple
and they were en route to Mount Hood's ski facility.
Matthews asked him if they would be kind enough to
give him a ride up the road, and he said,
if you'll let me out, I'll go to my house
(33:59):
and I'll get some assistance. And they gave him a
ride for about four or five miles. He finally said,
my home is just off the highway here a short
distance back in the trees. So the Good Samaritans lay
out and that was the last they saw.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Of Matthews had once again slipped through the FBI's fingers,
but they kept moving in getting closer each time. They
found the couple by tracing their credit card and began
to scour the mountain and we.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
Spent hours and hours and hours. We stayed in that
neighborhood for the rest of the night, and the next
day we found a cabin type home that we saw
a couple vehicles go in and out during the day
and always was males, not couples, and so we began
to focus our attention on one home in that area
that we thought could be what we were looking for.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
And as they watched the cabin, a white pickup truck
pulled out of the driveway.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
We had an air surveillance as well his ground surveillance
on that vehicle. We followed it for probably forty miles.
We decided that we would try to make a car stop,
but before we could get our vehicles in a position,
he exited the interstate and started going down dirt roads.
He had obviously made the surveillance and was trying to
(35:20):
shake us, so I lit him up with the lights
and he stopped. We determined very quickly he was a
member of the klu Klux Klan. There was a warrant
for him, and we had a sought off shotgun in
the back of his pickup.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Ken and his team brought in the driver and by
later that night they'd struck a deal.
Speaker 4 (35:42):
He would provide us how many people and who all
they were by name, and that they had gone up
to the Seattle area. He was to make contact the
next morning, to be taken later that afternoon to a
place out on Woodbey Island.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
We'd be Island is a remote area of coastline north
of Seattle, Washington, and now the likely refuge of an
armed separatist preparing for battle. Bob Matthews had been ready
in his troops.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
He pulls them all together and he tells them we
are now in a full state of war. Our demand
of Congress is going to be that they give us
five Northwestern states which will be under our care, control
and custody. These will no longer be states of the
United States of America, and that we demand this or
(36:37):
there's going to be massy chaos, massive loss of life.
Because we have a plan.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
For days, the house on would Be Islands sat under
Federal watch agents observed from tree lines, Coastguard patrols sealed
off the water.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
The FBI's hostage rescue team from Washington, DC took charge
of the whole scene. Or two and a half three
more days just surveilling that house and making sure that
no one came out that wasn't apprehended.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
And one by one, members of the order were arrested.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Slowly but surely. We picked off the group one or
two at a time as they would go to maybe
get groceries or supplies, and we would stop them and
arrest them. So I'm sure that that became a clue
to Robert Matthews that once you leave here, they were
being picked off by law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Until only one man remained.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Bob Matthews will not surrender, he refuses.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Hostage negotiators tried to get him to leave the house,
but were unsuccessful. As night fell, the lead negotiator decided
it was time to switch tactics.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Turns to me. He says, Wayne, there's no hostage anymore,
so I can't stay here and Bob will not surrender.
So it's decided that we will employ swap teams try
to get about.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
They converged from all over.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
We had swapped teams from Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Salt Lake City, Denver, and Butte, which was the swap
team I.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Was on, and we had the house completely surrounded with
the exception of the back of the house because you
had to walk no further than maybe ten or twelve steps,
and it was about a two hundred foot drop off
right down to the shoreline of Puget Sound, So we
were not concerned that anyone could come out of that
and escape.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
The FBI began to move in.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
We deployed tear gas for over an hour, and we
saw our detective no movement, no sounds of him moving
around or anything. Then we decided we would elevate to
a higher concentration and more volume of tear gas was
then administered within the residence. That went on for period
of two two and a half.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Hours, but Matthews didn't come out. So they next sent
canine officers and their dogs into the house.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
And the dog supposedly could handle tear gas and was
not affected by it. The owner stayed on the main
floor and the dog went through every room up in
the house and did not react to any type of
human presence or someone that was alive. That made us
believe that Matthews might have succumbed to excessive tear gas.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
And SWAT took it from there.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
One agent throws a flash bang and grenade through a
window into the ground floor. It's a type of thing
that's got such a shock value that people actually just freeze.
And the team goes in through the front door, and
I ducked the windows out on the side guindow, so
I've got them covered as they're going in.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Then just as they entered the ground floor.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Robert Matthews opened up with an AR fifteen and shot
through the floor down into the main floor of the home.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
At that point, I had made some racket and Bob
Matthews knew where I was because he could hear the noise,
so he opened fire on me, and I took about
five or ten rounds just inches above my head. Debris
fell on top of the wool hat I was wearing
where the bullets passed through.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
All we could do was try and take cover.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
We can't shoot because we don't have a target. That's
an FBI premise. You might be able to see what
you're shooting at. He can't shoot it a sound, but
he was shooting that sounds. Then another agent off to
the left of me, about fifteen feet inside the house
in the corner. He ran across the house to the
other side. When he did that made a noise, and
(40:55):
Bob opened up and took out that corner where he'd
been standing.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Agents scrambled to shield themselves from the barrage of gunfire
as they strategized their next move.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Fortunately, no agents were hit and they immediately vacated the house, so.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
We pulled out went back into the woods to make
another ploy as it got dark that night.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Matthews had military training, heavy weapons and showed every sign
he'd fight to the death, but that wouldn't stop the agents.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Darkness came and we decided to bring helicopters in.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
The helicopter flew out over Puget Sound and illuminated the
rear of the house with a huge ten thousand kindlepower spotlight.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Helicopters are very frightening when they sit right down on
top of you. That's what we did, set them right
down on top of the roof, blowing shingles off the roof.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
But even the helicopters did work.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
Matthews opened up on the helicopter with his AR fifteen.
Helicopter immediately left the area.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Then he turned his rifle back towards the ground.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Bob went over and he opened fire on the team
on the west side of the building. They fired back
I'm standing in a little patch of trees. He must
have had night vision equipment. He opens up on me
from the upstairs went down, bulletsters slapping into the trees
around me, and I've got an MPK five, fully automatic,
(42:37):
so I open up into his muzzle fire, firing bursts
of five rounds, and he's doing about the same. And
I can't figure out why he's not down because I
was a very good shot and I was shooting directly
into his muzzle blasts. But I found out he did
have body armor. He was probably hurt, but we were
killing him. They fired the flare into the house to
(43:00):
light up the bottom of the house so we could
see if he went downstairs.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
That caused a fire, and it was spreading quickly, and.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
We're standing there twenty yards apart, just firing back and forth,
fire burning in a house down below. Then the fire
reaches the upstairs area, and I can hear rounds being
popped off, because that's what they do when fire gets
to them. The realms explode, the bullets go somewhere, and
it sounded like there were a thousand or more bullets
(43:32):
going every witch direction until eventually it was just quiet,
and I stood there.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Bob Matthews never came out of that house.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
And the cabin burned, burned, burned to the ground. And
I stood there all night with my rifle shouldered, and
then at first daylight I walked forward and when I
got to the cabin, there at the edge of the
foundation was re forced iron tobb ceramic inside that had
fallen from the upstairs floor to the ground stairs floor,
(44:07):
and Bob's body was inside it.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
He had submerged himself in a bathtub using a straw
like device to breathe air, but it cooked him live.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
The manhunt was officially over here again, his former special
agent Ken Lovin.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
I don't think I've ever done anything. I don't believe
anyone else had. For that duration of time twenty four
to seven that we were literally on edge and we
knew that any mishap somebody would be killed at any
given time was extremely high tension.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
For Wayne too. It was complicated.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
It was a really mixed emotion thing. I was glad
there was no probability that he was going to kill
one of us. I was sad that he didn't just surrender,
and I could have sat down and had an opportunity
to question him to have all my questions answered that
only he could answer.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Once the fire went cold, they just packed up and
moved on.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
That's the way it is. There was no downtime, no
vacation time, There was nothing. When this one was over,
we went right back into the next biggest fish that
we could catch.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
But Bob Matthews and all the hate and danger he
represented stayed with them. Without their leader, would the order survive.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
They were dedicated to him, but they weren't committed to
the cause. Bob was committed to the cause. They used
to tell an old joke. They'd say that when you
sit down to breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken
they gave you those eggs was dedicated. The hog they
(45:58):
gave you that ham was committed. Bob was committed.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Bob Matthews was dead, but his cause and his followers
didn't die with him, and neither did the threat.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
They had an organization of people that were counterfeiting Robin banks,
cash couriers, armored car trucks. They did assassinations, they did bombings,
and when you think about it, that's a rarity you
seldom come across an organization that crosses so many criminal lines.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
And no one had yet been held accountable for Allenberg's murder.
The man who was believed to have pulled the trigger,
Bruce Carrol Pearce, was still out there and he was
Wayne's next target. That opportunity came when Pierce was arrested
in Atlanta. Wayne went down to interview.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
Him, and he admitted to every crime that he and
the others had committed.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Pierce confessed to armored car robberies, the counterfeiting operation, and
his key role in the Order's violent campaign, but he
stopped short when it came to Allenberg's murder.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
I knew that he was the trigger man. He said, Well,
let me ask you. If a man was the trigger man,
and that man confessed and cooperated in the trial, could
that man be guaranteed that he wouldn't get the death penalty?
And the only thing I could tell him was I said,
(47:36):
in that scenario, I would take the cooperation to the
United States attorney, who can take it to the federal
judge and a decision can be made. But I can't
make that promise, And he said, I want a lawyer
before we discussed the Allenburg matter.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
That's where the converse station ended. But the case against
the Order now began that September in Seattle. In nineteen
eighty five, ten Order members stood trial together in what
became the government's sweeping RICO case against the group. Alan
Berg's murder became a part of that case.
Speaker 8 (48:20):
The Denver murderers was included in the indictment as murder
under the Denver statutes. And you're allowed to do that
under RICO because it incorporates that crime as part of
a pattern of racketeering activities. So they weren't charged separately
with the murder, I mean in a separate murder trial.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
That's Gene Wilson, the federal prosecutor who tried the Order.
All the various crimes were presented together as pieces of
the overall conspiracy.
Speaker 8 (48:54):
The evidence was pretty blatant. There's, of course the Burg murder.
There were various are on robberies. There was transporting property
across state lines, which is a federal crime covered in RICO.
There was counterfeiting. We were fairly confident going into it
that some of the crimes that they had committed were
(49:15):
so horrible that the jury would be very likely to
find them guilty.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
And they did. Bruce Carroll Pierce was convicted on racketeering
and conspiracy charges. He was sentenced to two hundred and
fifty two years. David Lane received one hundred and ninety.
Gary Yarborough got eighty five. Seven other members of the
order were also convicted and received decades long terms. The
(49:44):
actual case of Allenberg's murder stayed in state hands, and
after the federal convictions, that case was never tried.
Speaker 8 (49:53):
They got so much of a sentence in this case
a Denver local attorneys and US attorneys, that was probably
not necessary to do that.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
In the eyes of many, overall justice had been served.
But to those who knew Alan, like his close friend
Peter Boyles, something had been left unresolved.
Speaker 5 (50:16):
No one ever stood trial for the murder of allen Burg,
No one ever did. I was so angry. That's stupid,
racist bastards could kill that gun. I was stunned by that.
That was when I was sitting in this federal courtroom
looking thinking, look at you, like these were just losers
(50:36):
everyone else.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
The verdict affected people differently. For some, it stirred frustration.
For others, like Wayne Mannis, it marked the end of
a relentless pursuit. But he knows the fight is still
far from over.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
It was the most significant verdict of my career. But
I knew in my heart, I knew it's not over.
There's thousands of people that feel the same way that
these people do, and all it would take is just
a spark and the fuel from a charismatic leader to
(51:16):
reignite it and be part back again. And I feel
that way today.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
The true threat is the ideology, and Wayne knows if
history is any indication that ideology didn't die in the
courtroom in the eyes of the order. They were waging
a rightful war against the government, but at its root
was hate and bigotry, and it was a war that
(51:42):
left very real victims like alan Berg.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
When I say it changed everything in my life, it
changed everything. I mean, it was still radio. It was fun,
it was a kick and he asked. We had a
great time, but it was there was a hole in
my soul that he wasn't there years ago.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
I'm eighty one.
Speaker 5 (52:01):
Now you know he's part of the mist. Now he's
part of the legacy of what happened.
Speaker 9 (52:09):
I don't think I'm anything but alan Berg. I refuse
to accept the label. There's nothing connected with my whole
life that represents labels none. In fact, the fact that
I've been in this ten years, with my style, my
outspoken behavior, and some very difficult times that I've gone through,
I feel blessed that I had ten years of this.
If I never worked another day, I'm a very lucky
man to have been able to do what I do
(52:31):
is my truth.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Alan Berg was a voice that cut through the noise,
and for some that made him dangerous, for others unforgettable.
Speaker 6 (52:43):
Alan Berg was a purveyor of words, was a purveyor
of ideas. You can't kill words, and you can't kill ideas.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
The order may have been dismantled, Bob Matthews may have
gone downs, but the bigotry didn't die with them. In
the years to come, that ideology would inspire new enemies,
driven by a different cause, but fueled by the same beliefs.
But in the shadows, another group driven by hate was
(53:17):
about to strike Manhattan.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Next time on Law and Order, criminal justice system.
Speaker 3 (53:34):
I felt the whole building heave, It actually lifted.
Speaker 6 (53:38):
One of the first things I saw was a crater
at one hundred and twenty some feet in diameter. There
was a litany of more serious injuries, cardiac arrests, concussion injuries,
trauma from the explosion itself, plus fractured and broken bones.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Actually saw a ripple go across the Hudson River.
Speaker 5 (53:56):
They located the VIN number off the writer's rock that
was used in the bombing and the rest of the case.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Blossomed Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production
of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna
Sega Nicolaze. The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive
produced by Dick Wolf Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at
(54:25):
Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor
Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and
producer Jesse Funk. This season is executive produced by Anna
Sega Nicolazi. Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage.
(54:46):
Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.
Original music by John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post
with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over
me Steve Zernkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New
York for providing archival material for the show. For more
(55:09):
podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks
for listening.
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