CZM Rewind: The Roommates & In Minecraft

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello listeners, I've got a pair of classic We're Little
Guys episodes for you today. These originally aired in August
of twenty twenty five, so if you're a newer listener,
you may not have heard this story. But the Nazi
Terracel member who converted to Islam in Minecraft and then
murdered two of his Nazi friends, it's a wild ride.

(00:35):
Usually when I run an older episode on the feed,
I'll try to put something new here at the top,
some additional commentary, an update, something like that. And in
this case, there are a couple of updates to the story,
so I'm actually going to stick them on at the end.
It just makes more sense that way, So even if
you heard these episodes the first time around, you could

(00:58):
stick around until the end to hear about the fun
word search puzzles Nazis are putting in their prison newsletters.
We'll be back to our regularly scheduled Weird Little Guys
next week. It was a little after five point thirty
PM on a Friday evening when the first nine when

(01:21):
one call came in. The property manager at a gated
condo complex in Tampa sounded almost like she was asking
a question when she told the operator that a man
had walked into the leasing office and announced that he'd
just killed two people. What a strange thing to say
to a lobby full of maintenance technicians and a woman

(01:41):
who was just trying to check her mail. Maybe it
didn't quite sink in right away that he meant it.
He left the office and started walking. As she dialed
nine one one, she followed him, telling the operator that
he kept grabbing the back of his pants as he walked,
as if there was something heavy tucked into his waistband.

(02:04):
The police were already en route when the second call came.
The woman on the other end of the line this
time was calling from a smoke shop and a strip
mall across from the apartment complex. She was crying hysterically,
barely able to get the words out. There was a
man in the store pointing a gun at her. When

(02:24):
the police arrived, Devon Arthur's was holding a handgun in
one hand and a bottle of Coca Cola in the other.
He was ready to surrender, but he wanted to finish
his soda first. Once he was in handcuffs, an officer
asked him if anyone was hurt. He responded cryptically, saying

(02:45):
that there were people he'd hurt out back in the confusion,
his hostages had seized the opportunity to run out the
back door away from this ball little situation. So the
officer assumed that he meant one of those people had
been injured, but they were all unharmed. The officer again

(03:06):
asked him, who is hurt. He replied calmly, oh, the
people in the apartment. But they aren't hurt. They're dead.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is where the little guys.

(03:43):
This is a story that I've mentioned in passing a
few times before. It's always just a quick aside, a
sort of hand waving acknowledgment of that time two members
of Adam Woffin were murdered by their roommate. It was
a pivotal moment in the history of that now funked
neo Nazi terrorist organization. So it comes up in just

(04:04):
about any story involving any member of Adam Woffin, but
I've never really bothered to explain it. I'm usually busy
trying to get somewhere else. I was thinking about it
again this week because I was thinking about Brandon Russell,
the founder of Adam Woffen. These murders usually come up

(04:24):
when I mentioned Brandon Russell because they're kind of what
put him in federal prison the first time. Not because
he committed them. He didn't. He wasn't even home when
it happened. But it was his name on the lease
at the condo, and it was his name written in
sharpie on the cooler full of explosives police found in
the garage. Brandon Russell did his time for having that

(04:48):
little bomb workshop, and he's since been convicted again, this
time for conspiring to blow up the power grid in Baltimore.
If you're listening to this episode the day it came out,
he might be SAI in front of a federal judge
right now receiving his sentence. I'm not psychic, so I
couldn't tell you how long he's going away for this
time around. But that upcoming sentencing got me thinking about

(05:13):
how he ended up there, and that story starts with
these murders. I hadn't intended to focus so much on
the murders themselves. I didn't think there was really all
that much meat to the story. Most of the news
articles I've read in the past kind of say the
same thing, just those broad strokes. I was already familiar

(05:35):
with Devin Arthur's shot and killed Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy
Himmelman in the apartment they shared with Brandon Russell. All
four men were members of Adamoffen, and the investigation into
the murders led to the discovery of the explosives in
the garage. The explosives belonged to Brandon Russell, and he
was federally charged for possessing them. His federal case doesn't

(05:56):
have a lot of detail to it because he pled
guilty pretty quickly, and Devin Arthur's criminal case wasn't federal.
But then I remembered this happened in Florida. People loved
to make jokes about the Florida Man, the idea that
people in Florida are uniquely predisposed of committing bizarre crimes.

(06:19):
Florida man throws live gator at fast food cashier. Florida
man leads cops on high speed horse chase, Florida man
rob's convenience store a dressed as Spider Man. All real headlines.
But people in Florida aren't actually more likely than people
from anywhere else to crash a car into a grocery

(06:39):
store while high on meth or whatever else. This mythical
Florida man is getting up to. Florida just happens to
have some of the broadest public records laws in the country,
making it incredibly easy for journalists to quickly gain access
to police reports and court records. I wish every weird
little guy would do his little crimes in the state

(07:01):
of Florida, because it makes my job so much easier.
In this case, it means I was able to read
hundreds of pages of police reports, watch police interrogation videos,
and view court records not just for this murder case,
but filings from the murderer's parents' divorce, and it painted

(07:23):
a slightly different picture from the one I had in
my head. But as always, let's start before the beginning.
Adam Woffen was an international network of neo Nazis. It
was one of several organizations that formed out of relationships
that started on an online forum called Iron March. Iron

(07:48):
March first appeared online in twenty eleven, launched by a
Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnadoff. In its six years online,
it was an incubator for neo Nazi ideology the world.
Fascist organizations like National Action in the United Kingdom, Adam
Woffen in the United States, Skidas in Lithuania, and Antipodean

(08:10):
Resistance in Australia were all born on this forum. Existing
organizations grew and networked, and they recruited online posters into
real life terror cells. The site disappeared without explanation one
day in November of twenty seventeen. There was plenty of

(08:31):
speculation about why the site went dark, but Kitnadov declined
to answer any questions about it when he hung up
on a reporter from the BBC in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
One.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Theory popular among American neo Nazis is that there was
international governmental pressure to shut the site down because of
these murders. The birth date of Adam Woffen is typically
offered as October twelfth, twenty fifteen, the day Brendan Russell

(09:01):
posted a thread on the forum formally announcing the group's existence.
There were a handful of posts that refer to the
group by name that pre date that announcement thread, and
there are photographs of Russell holding an Adam off and
flag that were taken in the late spring and summer
of twenty fifteen, so it did exist prior to October,

(09:23):
but his claim in that post that the group had
existed for three years already is unlikely, especially considering that
he hadn't founded the group alone. His co founder was
a teenage boy named Devon Arthur's. Devin Arthur's was young.
He was born in nineteen ninety nine. His parents separated

(09:47):
when he was five, but didn't actually file for divorce
until twenty ten. The divorce was contentious, and it dragged
on for years. The court appointed a guardian ad item,
an attorney whose role is to advocate for the best
interests of the child. In one letter to the court
in twenty eleven, the Guardian adlam noted that Devon was

(10:08):
taking the divorce much harder than most children in his position,
and he was having behavioral problems. In twenty twelve, his
parents agreed in mediation that Devon should be evaluated by
a child behavioral specialist, which his mother claimed in subsequent
filings never happened. In the fall of twenty fourteen, when

(10:30):
he was still living primarily with his father, he ordered
a copy of minecomph off of Amazon. When the package
arrived in the mail, his father opened it, saw what
was inside, and refused to let his son have the book.
After Devon physically confronted his father over the text, his
dad kicked him out. According to his mother's filings in

(10:51):
the divorce case, his father abandoned him at her house.
The estranged couple lived in different counties, so the sudden
move meant that he had to change schools midyear. He
only ended up attending his new school for a few months.
He dropped out of school later that year before finishing
the tenth grade. Devon Arthur's joined the Iron March Forum

(11:15):
in March of twenty fifteen, just a few days before
his sixteenth birthday, and the same month he dropped out
of high school. By April of twenty fifteen, Arthur's and
Russell were hanging out in person after realizing they both
lived in the Orlando area. In the fall of twenty fifteen,
when Russell announced that Adam Woffin was open for new members,

(11:36):
he claimed the group already had chapters in Chicago, Texas, Boston,
New York, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Missouri, Oregon, and Virginia, with
more than forty members nationwide. A private message that Arthur
sent another user around that same time, though, puts that
number closer to fifteen, mainly in Central Florida, though there

(11:57):
was a small cell of just three guys in the Chicago.
When Brandon Russell bragged in November that the group had
met up to do quote a lot of activism, what
he actually meant was that he and Devon had gone
to the University of Central Florida to hang up racist flyers.
It was a group of two, but the pair were close.

(12:22):
In separate police interrogations on the night of the murder,
both Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's told police that they
were the best of friends, and they had been for years.
When Russell joined the National Guard in twenty sixteen, he
left Arthur's in charge of Adam Woffin. At first, things
seemed to be going really well for Arthur's as the

(12:43):
group's interim leader. He was recruiting and vetting new members,
and he was even trying to get some new chapters
off the ground. In April, he exchanged messages with a
prospective new member in the Boston area, one of the
men he would murder a year later, In May of
twenty sixteen, he organized a flyering campaign in Boston. There

(13:05):
were only two Adam Waffen members in the Boston area
at the time, a woman who posted under the username Rexa,
and the young man Arthur's had just approved for membership,
Andrew Onischuk. A few weeks later, Rexa got a direct
message from Slavros, the site's moderator, who is widely believed

(13:25):
to be the site's founder, Alexander Mukitnadoff. He sent her
a link to a now deleted post on Twitter showing
that someone had made the connection between the flyers and
the Iron March users who'd put them up. The post
claims that there were two known Adam Woffen members in
the Boston area and that one of them was a

(13:46):
student at MIT. The post didn't actually reveal her name,
but she was panicking. How could they know any of that?
What else did they know? She Baggedslavros to wipe out
her account history, writing can you delete my account here please?
Or delete all my posts please? I go to university.

(14:10):
I cannot be involved with this. If they find me,
my entire life is ruined. But he refused, saying that
it would only make her look even more guilty if
the posts were deleted now, and she had nothing to
worry about anyway. He assured her that there was simply
no way for anyone to access her IP address. They

(14:31):
didn't know it at the time, but an anti fascist
researcher had made an account on Iron March and tricked
several users into clicking a link that recorded their IP addresses.
She clicked it from a school computer, revealing her to
be a student at MIT. Without knowing how this person

(14:51):
knew exactly where she was, they had to consider the
possibility that someone had sold her out. She insisted in
her messages with Slavros that despite Devin Arthur's recent conversion
to Islam, they were still on good terms, and he
assured her that he hadn't said anything to anyone. The
forum was buzzing that week. The interim leader of Adam

(15:15):
Woffen had announced his conversion to Islam. Sometime in May
of twenty sixteen, Devon Arthur's updated his Iron March profile.
Older archived versions of his user profile show that he'd
listed his location as quote Dixie Land and his ideology
as Confederate National Socialism. With this new update, he now

(15:40):
lived in the Land of non Believers, and he identified
as a Salophist national socialist. There was apparently a bit
of a blow up over this conversion in the massive
data dump of leaked posts from Iron March. This threat
isn't there. Was deleted by the moderators pretty quickly, so

(16:03):
it wasn't there to scrape when researchers pulled everything off
the site later, But the moderators didn't delete people's direct
messages about the thread, and those private conversations are in
the data. Despite what Devin Arthur's would later claim, his
conversion to Islam wasn't a renunciation of his prior beliefs,

(16:27):
it was a twisted evolution of them. In one direct message,
a user who saw the thread before it was deleted
said that Arthur's plan to convert other Adam Waffen members
to Islam. He failed to convince the forum that his
newfound commitment to jihad was the right direction for American
neo Nazis, and he was banned from the website. Slavrose

(16:51):
threatened to cut ties with Adam Woffin entirely, but several
members of the group said they'd convinced Arthur's to step
down as interim leader until Brandon Russell returned from army training.
Two other members would step up to run the group. Ironically,
one of those new interim leaders was also a Muslim convert.

(17:12):
David Cole Tarkington had converted to Islam more than two
years before Devon Arthur's did, and it doesn't appear to
have been a secret. Tarkington was a major recruiter for
Adam woffin bringing in at least eleven new members to
the group in twenty sixteen, including John Cameron Denton, the
man who would go on to lead the group after

(17:32):
Russell went to prison. But when Arthur's was being interviewed
by that homicide detective, he said that after he converted,
he realized his prior beliefs had been wrong, that the
hate left his heart, and guided by the Koran, he
came to understand that there was no point in wanting
to kill people of other races. A lot of the

(17:54):
news coverage takes his statements at face value. He killed
his roommates because they were Nazis, and since his conversion
he wasn't anymore. But I have a really hard time
believing that we talked a little bit about the idea
of this strange melding of neo Nazism and interest in

(18:15):
Islamic extremism a few weeks ago in the episode about
Nicholas Young, the DC Metro transit cop with the Nazi
tattoos who went to prison for trying to send gift
cards to Isis, and it seems like an obvious contradiction.
How can a neo Nazi be a Muslim? Don't white
supremacists hate Muslims? They do, of course, but it's more

(18:39):
complicated than that. It's a contradiction, sure, but plenty of
people live in contradiction. And there's a lot of overlap too.
Even neo Nazis who would never entertain the idea of
a conversion are willing to talk about the possibility of
finding common cause with people they see allies and anti Semitism,

(19:02):
people whose commitment to armed extremism is appealing to them,
and all of the finer points of syncretic fascism Aside
Devin Arthur's didn't know what he believed. His conversion happened
in a Minecraft chat. Several friends he met through the

(19:22):
online game converted around the same time, and it seems
like for some of them. It was a bit. One
of those friends later told Rolling Stone that Devon's version
of Islam was weird. Quote. It wasn't true Islam. It
was more about idealizing the prophet Muhammad as a white arian.

(19:43):
You know, Muhammad as an ideal male form. I don't know,
he says, you know, but I don't know what he's
talking about, and it is unkind I think to cast
out on the sincere already of someone's religious conversion, but

(20:03):
I'm going to He was extremely online. His exposure to
Islam was through memes and jokes in a chat room
populated by teenage gamers who met on four Chan. He
was a high school dropout with absent parents. He was
struggling with mental illness. He never spoke to in a

(20:26):
mom about his religious path. When it came to reading
the Koran, he was entirely self taught, and it sounds
like he didn't get it. But taking it face value,
Devin Arthur's was Muslim in his own way. The other
neo Nazis didn't like it, and he was kicked off

(20:47):
the Iron Mars Forum. He was forced to step down
as interim leader of Adam Woffin, but he wasn't kicked
out of Adam Woffin, and he didn't even stay off
of Iron March. He still logged in to use the
site of under Brandon Russell's account, and he stayed best
friends with Brandon Russell. In October of twenty sixteen, months

(21:08):
after this blow up, he and Brandon traveled to Massachusetts
together to visit Adam Woffin's Boston cell, which at the
time consisted of just two members, Andrew Anischuk and Jeremy Himmelman.
They both joined the group that year and quickly became
very close friends. Several of Jeremy's friends in Boston met Devon,

(21:31):
Arthur's and Brandon Russell during that trip, and they all
said the same thing. These guys are fucking weird. They
cannot behave in a normal fashion. Jeremy Himmelman's sister begged
him to get these people out of the apartment that
the siblings shared. They wouldn't stop drawing swastikas on things

(21:52):
and making Holocaust jokes. Devon kept calling her a dumpster slut.
Another friend of Jeremy said quote, it was very obvious
that they were mentally unstable people. A few months later,
in January of twenty seventeen, Jeremy Himmelman flew down to
Florida to visit Brandon after he faked a suicide attempt

(22:14):
as a joke. It was a cruel joke. I mean,
it would be cruel in any context, but Brandon almost
certainly knew that Jeremy had tried several times in the
last few years to end his own life, so of
course he dropped everything to be there when he believed
Brandon had nearly died. Two months later, in March of

(22:37):
twenty seventeen, back home in Massachusetts, Jeremy Himmelman attempted suicide
for a fourth time after an argument with his roommates.
He survived. His girlfriend and his parents say that it
was a wake up call for him. He was ready
to leave Adam Woffin behind. It wasn't good for him.

(22:57):
These weren't his friends. This wasn't a path forward, but
he didn't have any other path forward either, and he
was having trouble cutting ties. He didn't leave the Chats.
He was still best friends with Andrew on Ashuk and
he didn't have a lot else to do, so when

(23:20):
Brandon Russell invited them both back to Florida. They went
that same month. In March or twenty seventeen, Brandon Russell's

(23:42):
grandmother co signed e lease for him. It was a
nice little condo in a gated community in Tampa. Sometime
in early April, he and Devin moved in, and that's
when he started begging Andrew Onishuk and Jeremy Himmelman to
come down and visit, come down and spend the summer
with us. He promised them a rent free summer in Florida.

(24:05):
They could go fishing, there was a pool. It will
be fun. Andrew and Jeremy regretted it almost immediately, Barely
a week into their stay, they were already talking about
going home early. His two bedroom condo wasn't big enough
for four men. Andrew and Jeremy shared the smaller bedroom,

(24:26):
Devin slept in the living room, and Brandon kept the
larger bedroom for himself. Brandon was gone along. On top
of being in the National Guard, he had a job
at a shooting range. Andrew and Jeremy got temporary jobs
at a recycling plant, but Devin just sat in the
living room all day on the computer. The place was messy.

(24:49):
No one did dishes. I was going to say. I
assume they didn't even own a vacuum cleaner, but I
did see one in the crime scene photographs. It was
pushed up against the wall and the room underneath the
North Korean flag. They barely even had any furniture. The
room that Andrew and Jeremy shared didn't have a bed.

(25:09):
It was just a futon and a mattress on the floor.
This wasn't the fun Florida summer they'd imagined. Devin was
weird and annoying, and things were tense. They wanted to
go home. On May seventeenth, Andrew Anashuk told his parents
that he was going to come home early. He told

(25:32):
his mom that he planned to stay another week just
to finish out his temp job. He didn't feel right
walking away from it. Just two days later, though, on Friday,
May nineteenth, he'd changed his mind. He had to go,
and he was going to leave on Monday. Jeremy Himmelman
called his girlfriend that day to lament Andrew's decision. He

(25:54):
was going to miss Andrew, but things had gotten too
uncomfortable in the apartment. That same day, May nineteenth, Brandon
Russell left the condo early in the morning, He had
National Guard drill that weekend and had to report in
that day. Devon was, as always, at home on the

(26:14):
computer all day. Around five p m, Jeremy was texting
with his girlfriend back home in Massachusetts. At five o
four p m. She asked him if they could FaceTime.
I'm hanging out with Devon and Andrew right now, maybe later,
he replied with a heart emoji. She said she might

(26:36):
take a nap, and he joked that she was probably
going to fall asleep for seven hours again like she
had last time. His phone was still resting on his
stomach under his right arm when crime scene Texts photographed
his body a few hours later. I can't tell you
exactly what happened in the fifteen minutes between five o

(26:56):
five p m and five twenty p m. When Jeremy
sent his last text to his girlfriend at five oh five,
nothing was wrong. He seemed relaxed. He said that he
was hanging out with his roommates, and he gave no
indication that anything was amiss. She knew all about the
ongoing tension in the apartment. He would have mentioned it

(27:18):
if anything out of the ordinary was happening. But at
five point twenty Devon Arthur's called his father and told
him that he'd just killed two people. There's no dispute
about the basic facts. Devon Arthur's shot Andrew Anischuk and
Jeremy Himmelman with a Wasser ten. That's a Romanian version

(27:42):
of an AK forty seven. Based on the medical examiner's report,
both men would have died instantly from multiple shots to
the head and torso fired from the rifle at close range.
They were both in the bedroom they shared. Jeremy was
lying on the futon and Andrew's body was on the
floor near the bathroom door. Devon left the rifle on

(28:04):
the couch in the living room, picked up at clock seventeen,
and walked out of the apartment. He walked over to
the leasing office, where he announced what he'd done to
two maintenance texts, the property manager and a resident, and
then he walked across the street into the strip mall
and entered the smoke shop, where he held the store
clerk and two customers hostage at gunpoint until the police arrived.

(28:27):
He's never denied what he did. Quite the opposite. All
he wanted to do was tell people. He called his dad,
He called his mom, he told the people in the
leasing office, he told the people in the smoke shop,
he told every officer he encountered after his arrest. But

(28:48):
as he continued to tell and retell this story, it
changed a little. And a report written by the officer
who transported him to the police station that night, it's
noted that Arthur's was talking almost constantly, offering up spontaneous
statements even though no one was asking him questions. The

(29:11):
officer wrote, Arthur's continued to repeat his story and would
add more details each time. Devon's account of the actual
physical sequence of events remains pretty consistent, and it mostly
matches up with the physical evidence. It's his recollection of

(29:32):
his internal monologue and his motivations that change throughout the evening.
It was a little after one in the morning, nearly
eight hours after the murder by the time a Tampa
homicide detective turned on the camera to record a formal
interview with Devon Arthur's and by that time he'd had
plenty of time alone to think, and over the course

(29:54):
of this two hour interrogation, you can hear him convincing
himself of the story that he's come up with.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
I hear Jeremy.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
He grabs my karan off and saying, and he says
he every book at fairy Tales here, and that set
me over the living and.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
I remember a blur. I shot them both, and I didn't.
I wasn't thinking clearly.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
This part is probably pretty close to the truth. It's
the same thing he said in the back of the
patrol car right after he was arrested. He killed them
because they made fun of him, because they mocked his religion,
because they disrespected his faith, because they were bullying him
pretty relentlessly, and he'd had enough. And there is plenty

(30:46):
of proof that that had been going on, so it's
no surprise that it would have happened again that evening.
I think this first story is the truth. He was
sitting in the living room clean the rifle when Jeremy
and Andrew started teasing him again. He'd spent the entire

(31:07):
day on the computer in an encrypted group chat full
of other members of Adam Laffen, and on that particular day,
the chat was making fun of him again. He was
reaching a boiling point and he snapped, And unfortunately, in
the moment that he snapped, he happened to already have

(31:28):
a rifle in his hands, and in that split second
where he made the decision to pull the trigger, that's
what he was thinking about. He shot them because they
made fun of him. But as the reality of this
situation settled in, that didn't really feel like a good
enough explanation. It may not have even been a conscious choice.

(31:53):
He may have eventually convinced himself that this is true,
but within an hour he's adding details to the narrative,
and the more time he has to think about it,
the clearer his news story becomes.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I remember what I was sitting in that cube or whatever,
and he's pacing back and forth. I'm like, and I
might thinking to myself, which cube in.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
The holding some rest of your data? I remember, like
I was thinking, like, you know, how could I have
done this? And stuff like that. And the only things
that could that I could rationalize was.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Like, you know, if I hadn't done that, if I
hadn't shut this organization down by doing this, they'd be
a lot more people dead than just two people.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
From that organization.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
I was really struck by this language. It's a little
too on the nose that he keeps literally using the
word rationalize as he's describing his thought process to the officer.
I think he's still processing what he's done. I guess
witnessing a murder is very traumatic, even if you're the

(33:00):
one who did it. He's still processing that experience. He's
still processing seeing his friend's dead bodies, and he's coming
to terms with it. He's trying to understand his own
actions and figure out how he's supposed to live with them.
And he's externalizing that entire thought process in a recorded
interview with a homicide detective.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
And the thing that keeps from rational about this is that, like,
I feel, what I've done is horrible in the sense
of his human life has been moss, and I feel sad.
I feel like in the animal and I feel like
they should be a costal somewhere's you know, became mad
medicine or something like that to help me. And I

(33:44):
want you to know that, like I realized the full
extent of like you know, their families are going to
feel very bad about this, their loved ones, and I
feel the utmost.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Bad about that.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
But I also realized that these people, of what they
were planning with the explosives that were down downstairs, would.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Tell me about that what's that all about.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Adam Fasten's vision is his terrorist organization. It's a Nannazi
organization that was part of.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
It before I converted it.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
By the time he's sitting in that interrogation room at
one in the morning, he's the hero of the story.
He understands that it was a great tragedy to have
had to take those lives. But if you really think
about it, didn't he save countless lives by doing it.
I think it's the only way he can cope. He

(34:36):
told one of the officers on the scene shortly after
his arrest that he couldn't get the image of his
friend's dead bodies out of his mind. He said he
had no idea how much blood can come out of
a human body. He has to find a way to
convince himself that there was a good reason for it.
He feels like a monster, so he's trying to find

(34:59):
a way to be be a hero. But he's lying
an organization that he was part of before his conversion.
He had converted a year ago, and he still lived
with the group's leader. He still participated in the group's
private chats. He was still privy to the group's secret

(35:22):
internal operations. He went on group outings and road trips.
When Adam Woffin went camping, Devin was there when Adam
Woffin did training drills in the woods. Devon was there.
Just a month before the murders. He accompanied Brandon Russell
on a trip to Detroit, Chicago, and Boston for the

(35:43):
purpose of buying and selling guns. Remember, they live in Florida.
It's pretty easy to buy a gun in Florida, so
I don't think they were buying guns in places like
Chicago or Boston. So you'll have to use your imagination
to fill in the gaps here. Maybe they were selling

(36:06):
guns purchased in Florida to members of the group operating
in areas where it was harder to buy them. If
Devin Arthur's had abandoned his prior beliefs, if he was
so disgusted with neo Nazism, why was he participating in this.
He could have moved back in with either one of
his parents. He could have called the FBI. He could

(36:28):
have just stayed home when the Neo Nazi terrorist group
went out into the woods to practice shooting drills for
the race war. But he didn't do any of that.
He's telling this officer now in May of twenty seventeen,
that he was no longer a member of Adam Woffen
and hadn't been since his conversion a year earlier. And

(36:50):
I just don't think that's true. I think he's lying,
maybe even to himself. He sounds, for the most part
fairly lucid in this interview, but half a dozen psychiatrists
and forensic psychologists would eventually agree that he was profoundly
mentally ill. So a lot of this is maybe just

(37:15):
trying to cope with his own actions. But I don't
think it's just coping. I think he realizes he has
a bargaining chip here, because throughout the interview he keeps
asking to speak with the FBI, and he says he
has important information that they'll want to hear.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
If I could get like a meeting with an FBI
agent or something like that, I can shut down like
not just Adam Vobham, but at several other organizations, like
probably with a bunch assultates that I would.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Very much like to do that.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
He's pretty relaxed through most of the interview, but several
times he asks if what he's saying in the interview
is confidential, and when he's talking about that, he gets
very anxious, and the officer tells him that police reports
do eventually become public record, but he assures him that
sensitive information like the things he's talking about, can be

(38:13):
held back from public view. And he tells him that
what you say to me here just for the investigation,
nobody's going to see this video. Now. Remember, cops can
lie to you. Cops can always lie to you. It's
always okay for them to lie. Because I watched the

(38:33):
video of this officer telling Devin Arthur's that no one
would ever watch the video. He wants to tell the
FBI everything he knows about Adam Woffin, but he's very
worried that people will know he talked. He's worried that
members of the group will target him if they find out.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
And then on the other hand, if I somehow get
some kind of plea bar in from this and then
I get released, so I could kill bus somebody else
find that gets really especially since I know that I
unless whatever information you can reply shuts down the group, Darlie,
and these guys are just a.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Commission for that's the main thing. That's why I'm mainly
helping y'all.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Again, he's being very explicit here. You know, when he's
rationalizing his actions, he says out loud, I'm rationalizing my actions.
And now that he realizes he might have information to
trade for favorable treatment, he says, hey, maybe I'll get
a plea bargain out of this. He's saying the quiet
part very loud, And what he's saying is that he

(39:40):
wants to talk to the FBI about the bombs. I
imagine a cop usually takes you pretty seriously if you
start talking about bombs, just in case, even if you
are spinning a pretty fanciful sounding tale. And in this case,
even though what he's saying does sound a little far
f fetched, they're listening carefully because they know there's some

(40:05):
truth to it. Because they've already seen the explosives. Before
Devon Arthur's ever mentioned the presence of explosive material inside
the condo, the officers who arrived first on the scene
saw enough to make them cautious. The first officer to
enter the apartment wrote in his report that on his
initial walkthrough of the scene, he opened the closet in

(40:27):
the other bedroom, the one that belonged to Brandon Russell,
and on a shelf in the closet where you would
normally keep sweaters or something, there were several Geiger counters,
a significant number of batteries, and a lot of matches.
Another officer found a backpack near the front door that

(40:47):
contained electric matches and some kind of device that looked
like it might be an ied. They weren't entirely sure
what they were looking at, but they knew enough to
know that somebody else needed to be the one looking
at it. So they confirmed that the two victims were
deceased and not in need of any medical help, and

(41:08):
that the apartment was otherwise empty, and then they evacuated
the neighboring apartments while they waited for the bomb squad,
and so backing up to this point in our timeline.
When Devon Arthur's was arrested at the smoke shop, he
was put into a police car and he told the
officers that his two roommates were dead inside their home,

(41:28):
which was in the complex across the street, but he
couldn't remember the unit number they'd only just moved in
a month before, but he offered to show them which
one it was if they would drive him there, and
so as the police car is pulling up outside the condo,
they could hear someone screaming inside, and as the officers

(41:49):
are approaching the residence, a man dressed in military fatigues
came out the front door. He is hysterical, unable to
respond to their questions, collapses onto the ground, sobbing, crying,
and he's screaming, Jeremy is dead. That was Brandon Russell.
He arrived home sometime in that very small window of

(42:12):
time after the murders, but before the police arrived. He
wasn't there when it happened, but by the time the
police get there, he is. The property manager said that
she saw him driving erratically through the parking lot when
she was standing outside after dialing nine to one one.
So he had to have gotten home after five point thirty,

(42:35):
but before five point forty five he was detained by
the officers on the scene for obvious reasons. They just
watched him walk out of an apartment with two dead
bodies inside. They don't know what they're dealing with. So
around six pm, those officers who first entered the apartment
saw some things they thought they needed a bomb squad
for Brandon Russell and Devon Arthur's are both handcuffed and

(43:00):
sitting in separate police cars right outside, and both men
separately and for their own reasons, voluntarily disclosed to the
police that there are explosives inside the house. Devon is
starting to realize that he wants the police to know
that the people he killed were very bad men, and

(43:22):
that maybe they were going to use those bombs to
hurt innocent people, And at this point he adds that
I wouldn't kill innocent people. I had plenty of opportunities
tonight to kill innocent people, even those responding officers, and
I didn't do it. For Brandon, he's just trying to
get out ahead of the problem he knows is coming.

(43:43):
The cops already saw some suspicious material inside the condo,
but they hadn't looked in the garage yet, so he
told a detective that they would find some things in
there that they should know about. He said that in
the garage there's potassium chlorate thorium, which is a radioactive
material rocket propellant, and a compound called HMDT. Hexamethylene triperoxide

(44:11):
diamine is a highly volatile explosive compound. It is dangerous
to handle, it is dangerous to store. It is insane
to keep it in your garage when your garage is
directly underneath your living room. He did fail to mention
to the officer that there was also some ammonium nitrate
in there, but the bomb squad found it anyway. Russell

(44:35):
told the officer on scene that they are going to
find that stuff in the garage, but he wants them
to know that it's only there for fueling model rockets.
But as he's sitting there in handcuffs trying to convince
the officer that those explosives in the garage are just
for his hobby, he asks if he's ever going to
see his family again, because he knows what this looks like,

(44:58):
and it looks bad. He stuck to the li though
he's just a model rocket enthusiast having a very traumatic day.

(45:22):
At some point, both men were separately transported to the
police station to await their interrogations, and during Devin's interrogation,
he has a very clear idea of exactly what the
bomb squad is going to find in the house. He
knew what was in the house, where it was, and
how it got there.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
Yes, there is nuclear materials and in that in that garage,
there is some nuclear material It was in that garage
that in Asia MTD and those explosives.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
Yes, some ceremonium nitrate and leave.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
And I know that there's some radiated materials that he
was able to bring it through the Beha and because
he's a Bahamian cyst and he's able to bring.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
It and bring it in.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
And more than that, he was willing to tell anyone
who would listen what the group planned to do with
those materials.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
But the things that they're planning were horrible. They're planning
bombings and stuff like that on countless people. They're planning
to kill civilian life. What do they do with the
specific in their bless.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
Power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, things like that.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
He knew all the details of the group's plans. He
knew what Adam Woffin was going to do because he
was a member of Adam Woffin. He's in the chats
where these things are being discussed. He's in the living
room where these things are being discussed. And by the
time he's in that interrogation room, he's convinced himself that

(46:56):
that's why he murdered his roommates. It wasn't some petty
personal dispute. It wasn't because they were bullying him. It
was because he had to do it. He had to
stop them before they could hurt innocent people. And of
course the detective did specifically ask about the model rockets.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
You guys don't build model rockets and go out back
and down them, offer the or amount of the fires
for the July.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Now, not that none of that. It's all literally there
specifically to kill people.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
Is this probably the truth? I think so to some degree.

Speaker 1 (47:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Not to spoil the ending, but Brandon Russell was convicted
earlier this year for a separate plot to destroy electrical infrastructure.
He's also alleged to have co authored some of the
Terogram collective manuals that advise other neo Nazis on how
to go about carrying out their own attacks. It's not
at all hard to believe that he was thinking about

(48:00):
and talking about these things as he's building bombs in
his garage in twenty seventeen. And he wasn't a model
rocket enthusiast. He did work on a project involving a
model rocket as a member of the Engineering Club at
the University of South Florida, but that was in twenty
thirteen and he had since dropped out because he couldn't

(48:21):
pass calculus. There were no model rockets in the condo.
An explosives expert wrote in a report that no one
would use HMTD to power a model rocket. It's too volatile.
It's too volatile for pretty much everything. The military doesn't

(48:42):
use it. It fell out of favor in mining decades ago,
but it is possible to make it home if you're
not afraid of accidentally blowing your fingers off if the
workshop gets too warm, so it's still popular among terrorists.
At the end of his interview, Arthur says, again quite plainly,

(49:04):
if I hadn't done this, there would have been attacks.
He's sure of it now, that's why he did it.
He's sure at this point that he'd actually always thought that,
and that was what he was thinking before it happened.
Throughout his interview, Arthur's is asking to speak to the FBI.
He's insisting that they need to hear what he has
to say, and they keep sort of pushing him off, saying, yeah,

(49:28):
we can think about that, you know, we'll get to
that that's later. He doesn't know that an FBI agent
is watching a video feed from the next room, and
he's right. The FBI was very interested in what he
had to say, because shortly after that interview wrapped up,
the same detective sat down with Brandon Russell, and this

(49:49):
time that FBI agent is in the room. They talked
to Brandon for a little over an hour. The detective
had him sign a form confirming that he'd been informed
of his Miranda rights, but he was also told that
he wasn't in custody, he wasn't being detained, he's not
under arrest, and he's free to leave at any time.

(50:10):
He signed the form, and he agreed to talk without
a lawyer, which I'm fine with him doing, but you listener,
never talked to the police without a lawyer. They talked
a lot about the murders. Obviously he's talking to a
homicide detective in a homicide investigation. They talked about Devin

(50:31):
and Andrew and Jeremy, how they all come to be friends,
how they met online and in person, how that friendship
had fallen apart over Devon's conversion to Islam. Brandon says
Devon's conversion was never an issue for him, and I
think that's true. He insisted that what was going on
in the house was all just banter, just regular ball busting,

(50:54):
teasing between friends. After the detective rephrases the question half
a dozen times, he reluctantly agrees that, yeah, Jeremy and
Andrew crossed the line sometimes. Maybe they were bullying him
and Devin was having a hard time with it, but
he said it had never gotten physical and he never

(51:15):
thought anyone would get hurt. He also said Adam Waffin
was just a club for people with shared political interests,
and they liked to do outdoor activities together. He did
agree that those shared beliefs were national socialism, and he
got a little animated when he started complaining that schools
only teach lies about Hitler. For the most part, though,

(51:38):
Who's mumbling and his body language is guarded and anxious.
He's sitting sort of folded in on himself, slouching down
with his legs crossed and his arms folded tightly across
his chest. He's tired, he's traumatized, but he's scared. And
he insists throughout this conversation that everything they found was legal.

(52:01):
It was legally obtained, he wasn't planning to do anything
nefarious with it, and it was all related to his
hobby of building model rockets. After about an hour of this,
the detective's tone changes. He's been sort of yes, ending him,
just letting him talk, getting him to open up, talking

(52:23):
about his hobbies, not passing any kind of judgment, and
Brendon Russell has been portraying himself and his organization as
what the detective calls, you know, knuckleheads horsing around, you know,
just kids having fun. But if we look on your computer,
what are we going to find? Is it just jokes

(52:43):
and camping trips, or are we going to find that
you've made explicit threats? Are you saying things like he'll
all jews right? What are you saying? Are you making
the kind of threats that could lead to federal charges?
And at first Brandon tries to answer the question. He says,
you know, only ever as a joke, I've never said

(53:05):
that non satirically, and they press him a little harder
what kinds of things are you saying? And then he
just mumbles that maybe he needs a lawyer, So the
questions stop there. He's not under arrest. He can leave
at any time, and if he wants a lawyer, they're

(53:25):
not going to ask him any more questions. He can go,
but he can't go home though. The ATF has only
just arrived and they still haven't finished clearing the house
of explosive material. And until the ATF clears the scene,
the medical examiner can't take the bodies away, so he's
not going to be able to get into that condo

(53:45):
anytime soon. So Russell asks the detective to call his dad.
He doesn't ask if he can use the phone to
call his dad. He a twenty two year old member
of the military, is asking this other adult man, will
you call my dad? He doesn't actually know his dad's

(54:06):
phone number, and his cell phone is still inside the condo,
but he says, you know, you can just call the
Palm Beach County Sheriff's office and ask for him by name.
He's a deputy there, or maybe it's West Palm Beach.
He can't actually remember. He and his dad aren't close.

(54:26):
He wasn't around when Branda was a kid, and they
don't really get along now. But he tells the FBI
that he's going to drive to Palm Beach and stay
with his dad. His mom still lives in the Bahamas,
so he doesn't really have anywhere else nearby he can go,
so a little after six am on Saturday morning, a
Tampa police officer dropped Russell off outside the condo. The

(54:48):
Explosive Ordnance Disposal team had finished with the scene, so
detectives were just now arriving to conduct their search. One
of those detectives went inside and got his keys for him.
In her report, she notes that when she entered his
bedroom to look for his keys, she saw a large
framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh on his dresser. An explosives

(55:10):
enforcement agent from the ATF confirmed to the FBI sometime
early Saturday morning that the materials they found did meet
the legal definition of a destructive device. What they found
in that garage was enough to bring federal charges, but
by the time the ATF agents were done examining the
scene and writing of their findings, the FBI had already

(55:33):
let him go. He was gone. He said he was
going to his dad's house in West Palm Beach, but
he didn't. When FBI agents contacted his family, they said
they hadn't heard from him. Instead, of going to his
dad's house to get some rest, he'd driven straight to

(55:54):
the home of another Adam Woffin member. He told him
about the murders, said he needed to get away for
a while to clear his head. But his friend didn't
just toss a few t shirts and a toothbrush into
a backpack like you might expect someone to do for
a spur of the moment weekend away. Instead, he withdrew
all of the money from his bank account, quit his job,

(56:17):
and got into Russell's car heading south. When deputies apprehended
Russell in the Florida Keys a day later, the rifles
they'd bought at a sporting goods store were still in
their manufacturer's packaging. We'll pick back up next week with
the year's long ordeal in court of resolving Devin Arthur's

(56:38):
mental competency and Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison.
Hopefully by then we'll know how his story ends. He
is scheduled to be sentenced for his second foiled plot
on August seventh. Until then, I don't know to make
sure your teenage son isn't accidentally converting to a mimifi

(57:00):
version of Islam in a neo Nazi, minecraft chat, and
don't store volatile explosives in a cooler in your garage.

(57:29):
On Sunday, May twenty first, twenty seventeen, Monroe County Sheriff's
Deputy Diana Torres pulled into the parking lot outside of
a Burger King on Route One. There were plenty of
empty parking spots, but she wasn't there for lunch. She
positioned her patrol car directly behind a blue suv, blocking

(57:50):
it in, and got out of her car. As she
approached the restaurant, the door opened and a man walked out.
Before he had a chance to react, she grabbed him
by the wrist and started handcuffing him. For all his
tough talk online, Brandon Russell went quietly. He would later

(58:14):
say that he'd just needed to get out of town
to clear his head after what he'd experienced on Friday night.
He'd come home from work to find two of his
roommates dead in their bedroom, murdered by a young man
he'd considered his best friend. But when officers searched the car,
they didn't find the kind of luggage you'd expect someone
to have for a weekend. Tripped to the Florida keys.

(58:37):
There wasn't so much as a toothbrush in the vehicle.
Instead of T shirts and swim trunks, they found rifles
and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, some of it already
loaded into four high capacity magazines. Three hundred miles away,
in a jail cell in Tampa, a murderer was begging

(58:59):
for a meeting with the FBI. He claimed he knew
exactly why his roommate was driving around South Florida with
a car full of guns. I'm Molly Conger in this.
It's where the guys. When we left off last week,

(59:35):
two men were in custody and two men were dead.
The actual facts of the story are fairly straightforward, and
it would make for a pretty short episode. Devin Arthur's
eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree murder
for the murders of Andrew Anoshuk and Jeremy Hemmelman, as
well as three counts of kidnapping for the three people
he held at gunpoint at the strip. Mall Brand and

(59:58):
Russell pleaded guilty to federal charges of possessing an unregistered
destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials Devin was
sentenced to forty five years in a Florida state prison,
and Brandon was released in twenty twenty one after serving
most of a five year sentence. The narrative tension in

(01:00:20):
this story is not in what happened, but why and
what it might mean. Hundreds of pages of police reports,
years of filings in their respective criminal cases, scores of
news reports, at documentary TV interviews, there's no shortage of
material laying out the facts. But it all leaves me

(01:00:45):
with more questions than answers. I spent some time on
the show ruminating on one of these big questions before.
It's one probably better left to a philosopher than a podcaster.
But it's about the nature of truth. What does it
even mean to say that something is true? In this story,

(01:01:07):
we have a set of truths. Sure, we know that
these men are guilty of the crimes they committed. We
know it because a court said so. Devon killed two people.
Brandon had a garage full of explosive materials. That's true.
But because neither of them took their case to trial,

(01:01:30):
that's all we can really legally speaking, say we know
for certain. Maybe at trial there would have been a
more aggressive exploration of Devon's claims that he'd killed his
roommates to prevent the terrorist attack they were planning. Maybe
if Brandon had gone to trial, the government would have
had to prove to a jury what he was going

(01:01:52):
to do with those explosives. But they didn't, so we
don't know, and we're left trying to construct our own
version of what might be true. Aside from the concrete facts,
the physical evidence, the bullet casings, the autopsy reports, the

(01:02:14):
crime scene photographs, the rest of the pieces that we
have in this quest to assemble some version of the
truth are probably lies. So let's go back to where
we were last week, May nineteenth, twenty seventeen. The murders
happened on a Friday evening. Tampa police, responding to nine

(01:02:37):
one one calls about an armed man at a strip
mall found eighteen year old Devon Arthur's holding three people
hostage at a smoke shop. As he was being handcuffed, he
told the officers that his roommates were dead in his
apartment across the street, and he'd be happy to show
them which unit it was if they would drive him there.
As the police pulled up out front, another man walked

(01:02:59):
out the front door of the apartment and collapsed on
the ground in front of them, sobbing hysterically. Brandon Russell
had arrived home from work minutes after the murders and
discovered the dead bodies of Andrew Anshack and Jeremy Himmelman. Inside,
officers found not just the bodies of Devon's murder victims,

(01:03:20):
but Brandon's bomb making workshop. The crime scene was a
complicated one. When officers first arrived on the scene Friday evening,
they saw the bodies, of course, you couldn't miss them,
but they immediately noticed some other very concerning things lying

(01:03:41):
around the apartment. Geiger counters an unusually large number of batteries,
electric matches, piles of military year gas masks, bookshelves full
of white supremacist literature, a Nazi flag tacked to the wall,

(01:04:04):
a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, a backpack in the
living room with some kind of device inside that looked
like a bomb. Those first responding officers saw all of this,
and they got out of there in a hurry. There
was nothing they could do for the two men lying
dead in the bedroom. That much was very obvious based

(01:04:25):
on the state of the bodies, so they secured the perimeter,
evacuated the neighboring apartments, and waited for the experts to arrive.
All night. As Brandon and Devon sat waiting at the
police station, officers worked on the crime scene. Members of
the Tampa Police Department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal team entered first

(01:04:50):
to try to figure out how volatile the situation was.
The only reports I have access to were written by
Tampa police officers, so I can only see what they
said about their interactions with agents from the FBI and ATF,
but based on the crime scene logs. Bomb technicians from
the FBI arrived a few hours later, and agents from

(01:05:10):
the ATF arrived after midnight. It was the middle of
the night by the time Devon and Brandon were interviewed
by a homicide detective in the early morning hours of
May twentieth. Brandon Russell asked for a lawyer. He'd been
talking for over an hour already, but when the FBI

(01:05:31):
agent in the room pressed him a little too hard
about what they might find if they searched his computer,
he didn't want to talk anymore. He wasn't under arrest.
He was there voluntarily. He wasn't being detained. They weren't
technically investigating him at all. He had just happened to

(01:05:51):
come home from work and stumble into a crime scene,
so if he didn't want to talk anymore, he was
free to go. Around six am, a Tampa police officer
drove him home. The explosives experts had finished their sweep
of the residents and signed off on it being safe
to enter, so detectives were starting to arrive to execute

(01:06:12):
search warrants. Brandon waited outside in the parking lot while
a detective entered the condo to find his car keys,
and then he was on his way. His apartment was
a crime scene, and his mother lived in the Bahamas,
so he planned to drive to Palm Beach to stay
with his dad, or at least that's what he told

(01:06:35):
the FBI. There's a lot of uninteresting details here about
the memorandum of understanding between the FBI and the ATF,
but they share primary jurisdiction when investigating possible federal crimes
involving explosives, and both agencies have explosives experts, but ultimately,
the decision as to whether the materials found in the

(01:06:56):
garage constituted a violation of federal law was up to
the ATF, and by the time the ATF briefed the
FBI on what they found, Brandon Russell was gone. The
federal criminal complaint was signed by a judge by midday
on Saturday, just a few hours after Brandon Russell drove off.

(01:07:20):
No problem though, right he told them where he was going,
and if he drove straight there, he should have already
arrived at his dad's house in Palm Beach. FBI agents
called Brandon's dad, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy. But
not only was Brandon not there, his dad hadn't even

(01:07:41):
heard from him and had no idea where he might be.
So how did they find him? He could have gone anywhere.
I couldn't find anything in the court filings that indicated
that they had tried to ping his phone or that
they got a warrant for his banking information. They don't
seem to have tracked him down using his digital footprint.

(01:08:04):
But they found him pretty damn quick, and he was
arrested the very next day. Here's where we waded into
versions of the truth told by liars. Where we start
guessing about what these breadcrumbs might mean. Last week I
played some clips for you of the police interrogation video

(01:08:25):
recorded on the night of the murders, and in that interview,
Devon Arthur's very quickly settled into a story that positioned
him as some kind of hero. He knew it was
wrong to kill, but he had to do it. It
was the only way to save thousands of innocent lives.
And I told you that I think he was lying,

(01:08:49):
but it's a lie built around the truth. Devin shot
his friends because they made fun of him. He'd converted
to Islam a year earlier, and the neo Nazi community
did not take it well. He was pushed out of
leadership in Adam Woffin, a group he'd helped found. He

(01:09:10):
was banned from Iron March, the online Nazi message board
where he'd found friendship and a sense of belonging, but
he stayed involved with Adam Woffin, and he stayed best
friends with Brandon Russell, the group's leader. He lived with Brandon.
He traveled with Brandon when he drove cross country to

(01:09:31):
visit Adam Woffin cells or to buy and sell weapons
for use by the group, and on the day of
the murders, he was chatting online all day with other
members of Adam Waffin. He was very much still involved,
despite his claims after the fact. But as he's sitting

(01:09:52):
there in this interrogation room, I think a few things
are happening. Psychologically, he's trying to find way to rationalize
his actions. He needs to find a way to justify
what he's done, and he also realizes that he's made
himself a very nasty enemy. Killing two members of the

(01:10:15):
Nazi terror cell makes him a target of the Nazi
terror cell. It makes his family a potential target, and
he knows what kind of people he's just crossed, and
he doesn't want to go to jail, so he lands
in a story that potentially solves all three problems. If

(01:10:37):
he tells the cops everything, they'll take down Adam Woffin.
Then he's safe from retribution and he's a hero. He
can convince himself that he isn't a monster who shot
his friends in the head over a disagreement, and maybe
he'll even get a good deal in exchange for all
this information and won't have to go to prison. So

(01:11:00):
I do think he's lying about this. Being his actual
motivation for the murders. He wasn't trying to stop a
terrorist attack, but the lie came so easily because, regardless
of his intentions, when he pulled that trigger, he may
have actually ended up stopping a terrorist attack. The things

(01:11:22):
he told that detective weren't made up. As he's sitting
in that room rattling off a list of explosive materials
that he knows Brandon kept in the apartment, the bomb
squad is at the crime scene and they're inventorying those
exact items. And if that part was true, maybe other

(01:11:44):
parts of his story were too. When I first saw
where Brandon Russell was arrested, I wasn't sure what to
make of it. He's from the Bahamas, so maybe he
was going home. He has Behamian citizenship, most of his
family lives there. Maybe that's where he was going and

(01:12:05):
he just wanted to avoid the airport. Admittedly, geography is
not my strong suit, so I thought it might make
sense that you would take a boat from the Keys
to the Bahamas. And you can sure, but it looks
like typically you take a ferry from Fort Lauderdale, not

(01:12:26):
the Florida Keys, And then you have to ask yourself
if he was there because he was trying to get
home to the Bahamas. Why had he picked up a
friend first, Why had they paid cash for two new rifles,
and why hadn't he contacted anyone to let them know
where he was going. He wasn't going home. And the

(01:12:49):
cops found him as quickly as they did because they
knew exactly where to look for him, because Devin told them.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
He's planning on building mortar and firing it into a
There was a nuclear plant off the coast of Florida
and it's off the coast of Miami, and it's used
to power that entire city in Fort Lauderdale and that
kind of thing, and they're planning on firing a mortar
of nuclear materials in it at that plant into the
polank things that are in the water.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
The FBI alerted authorities in Monroe County, Florida, to be
on the lookout for Brandon Russell's vehicle. Deputy Torres didn't
find him in that Burger King parking lot by accident.
She was out looking for him. We had his picture.
We were told that he could possibly be going up
near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act. That's

(01:13:46):
all we knew. Turkey Point is the name of a
nuclear power plant. When Brendan Russell was handcuffed outside that
Burger King in Key Largo, he wasn't alone. Documents filed
in federal court don't name his friend, but police reports

(01:14:07):
from this initial encounter do. He was traveling with another
Adam Waffin member named William Chantra. When Brandon left Tampa
on Saturday morning, he didn't drive to his dad's house
in Palm Beach. Instead, he drove forty five minutes south
to Bradenton, Florida, and he knocked on his friend's front door.

(01:14:30):
He'd been up all night. He's still wearing his military uniform. Remember,
he discovered the bodies in his apartment when he got
home from work on Friday evening, and work in this
case was National Guard drill. He hasn't slept at all.
He doesn't even have his cell phone. But he drives

(01:14:50):
to Bradenton and he gets William Chantra out of bed
and he tells him what happened. You can't ever really
say what you would do in someone else's shoes in
a situation you've never found yourself in. But I can
use my imagination, and I think I would probably be
pretty overwhelmed at first. If I'm William Chantra, you know,

(01:15:14):
your friend is standing there on your front porch, exhausted
and traumatized, and he's telling you that these other two guys,
both friends of yours, are dead and he can't go
home because their dead bodies are in his apartment. I
think my next move would probably be to say, I
don't know, you know, hey, man, come inside, let me

(01:15:36):
get you some clean clothes, something to eat, maybe some tea.
You know, probably offer to let him stay on the
couch for a few days until he can figure something out.
Something like that, something that involved everyone going inside and
sitting on the couch. Like I said, that's not a
situation I've ever been in, So I don't know exactly

(01:15:58):
what I would do, but I can tell you with
one hundred percent, ironclad certainty what I would not do,
and that's quit my job, withdraw the entire balance of
my savings account, and get into that man's car heading
out of town. That just doesn't make any sense at
all to me, but that's exactly what William Chantra did.

(01:16:22):
He had three thousand dollars in cash and on their
way out of town. They stopped at the Chick fil
A where he worked to let them know he wouldn't
be back, and then they hit the road. There's not
a lot of specificity in the timeline, so I don't
know what route they took. But later that day they
stopped at a bass pro shop near Fort Lauderdale, and

(01:16:44):
they spent most of Chantra's cash on guns and ammunition.
After a night in a hotel, they headed south again
toward the Florida Keys. After his arrest, Brandon wasn't in
the mood to talk anymore. He admitted that there were
guns and ammunition in the car, but when he was
asked about Adam Woffin, he stopped talking. Jantra, on the

(01:17:09):
other hand, he was happy to chat. He wasn't under arrest,
and as far as I can tell, he's never been
charged with anything, and he had no problem telling the
officers about Adam Woffin. He was a member, of course,
and he'd met Brandon on Iron March, that neo Nazi
online forum. In this conversation with FBI agents, he describes

(01:17:32):
himself as a fascist, a national socialist, and a neo Nazi.
Believes he shares with his best friend Brandon Russell. Sometimes
they would go shooting together, and they'd recently been discussing
the possibility of him moving to Tampa into the condo
with Brandon, Jeremy, Andrew, and Devin. They were all friends

(01:17:57):
and they were all members of Adam Woffin. He helpfully
explained that sure, most members of Adam Woffin use iron March,
but Adam Woffin is actually much more exclusive than that.
Not anybody can just join. In fact, Brandon screen's potential
members to ensure that they share the group's ideology and

(01:18:17):
aren't quote complete idiots, which is an incredible statement, really,
considering this is behavior that you might expect from me,
a complete idiot. That thing I said a minute ago
about how he quit his job because he didn't know
if he was ever coming home again. We only know

(01:18:38):
he felt that way because he said it to an
FBI agent. And for the second time that weekend, the
FBI was sitting across the table from Brandon Russell. This time,
though he was in custody, it took a little bit

(01:19:03):
of time to get through the process of transferring him
from one district to another. He was arrested in South Florida,
but his case was in a court further north, back
home in Tampa in the Middle District of Florida. It
was June eighth by the time the US Marshals transported
him from Miami to Tampa to have his first real hearing.

(01:19:25):
He'd been in custody for more than two weeks already,
and his attorney asked that he'd be released on bond.
His grandmother owned a home in Orlando that she was
willing to offer us collateral, and both his mother and
grandmother said they'd watch over him to ensure he complied
with any release conditions. He had no criminal history, he
was a member of the National Guard, his father is

(01:19:47):
a police officer, and his attorney said, there's just no
evidence that he's a flight risk or a danger to
the community, and the judge agreed. The judge agreed that
there was nothing going on here that convinced him that
this defendant should be held in detention, and he granted
the motion for bond. But before he could sign the

(01:20:11):
final order releasing Russell, the government filed an urgent motion
for a stay. They said, look, just give us seventy
two hours to write a more detailed explanation, let's brief
this thing a little more thoroughly before we do anything rash.
Because this case never went to trial. This frantic back

(01:20:32):
and forth about whether or not he would be released
on bond is actually the most detailed set of documents
in the entire case. It sounds like the government was
maybe phoning it in at that first attention hearing. They
sketched out the details, but they didn't offer a lot
of evidence to demonstrate what they were talking about. So

(01:20:55):
when the judge initially granted that motion for bond, he's
saying things like, oh, the government believes that the defendant
is a purported leader of a neo Nazi group. The
government asserts that the materials could be used to make
a bomb. The government suggests that the defendant is active
on social media sites, but doesn't proffer any particulars. It

(01:21:18):
doesn't sound like they did a great job presenting any
evidence at all here. It sounds like they figured the
judge would hear the keywords Nazi and bomb and not
need to hear much more than that. The judge granted
them that three day pause on the release order, and
they returned to court later that week for another hearing

(01:21:41):
on the issue of bond, and this time the prosecution
brought the evidence the court needed to see. Those materials
found in the garage weren't just some odds and ends
that could be reasonably explained away as model rocket supplies.
There was a cooler full of homemade hexamethylene, triperoxide diamine,

(01:22:02):
a highly volatile explosive compound with no safe or practical use.
There were jars of nitromethane and potassium chlorate, a coffee
grinder full of some unknown white powder. There were bags
of potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, iron oxide, and hexamine. He
had several pounds of ammonium nitrate, much of which was

(01:22:26):
in bags still inside a box addressed to him by name,
and there littered amongst these bomb making materials there were
shell casings that he'd fitted with fuses, a homemade setup
that can be used to detonate a bomb. In his bedroom,
he had flyers for his Neu Nazi group on his dresser.

(01:22:48):
There was a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy mcveay.
In his closet. There were piles of military gear and
cases of ammunition. In the bedroom where his roommates were
found dead. There was a duffel bag full of homemade
fuses and handwritten instructions for making a bomb. The prosecution

(01:23:10):
also produced pages of screenshots of posts that Brandon Russell
had made on Iron March, showing that he was actively
recruiting for a group that, in his own words, he
calls fanatical and militant. And this motion to revoke bond
is the document where we find that anecdote about his

(01:23:30):
friend telling the FBI agent that when he left home
with Brandon he didn't know if he would ever be back.
After reviewing this evidence, the judge changed his mind. He wrote,
upon further consideration, I am obliged to conclude that defendant's actions,

(01:23:51):
in response to the discovery of the explosive materials and
ongoing investigation, past doubts on suggestions of defendant's innocent intents.
In his order revoking Russell's bond, the judge gives voice
to the problem I was talking about at the top
of the episode. It's hard to know what's true. A

(01:24:12):
lot of the connective tissue here is based on claims
made by Devon Arthur's immediately after he was arrested for murder.
The judge watched the same video I did, and he
came to some of the same conclusions. A lot of
what Devon was saying looks like quote attempts by mister

(01:24:32):
Arthur's to rationalize or justify his unconscionable killing of two people.
But the judge also said, there's no denying that some
of what Devon said is definitely true, writing quote, Arthur's
statements of potential harm appear consistent with what has been
revealed so far about the defendant and the lifestyle he engaged.

(01:24:55):
In consistent with other circumstances, defendant is placed at the
head of a SMA all neo Nazi group with a
militant bent, armed for violent confrontation and capable of executing
on plans to harm others or destroy property. The judge
was a little concerned that the government had yet to
produce any proof corroborating Devon's claims that there were internal

(01:25:17):
Adam Woffen chats containing explicit discussion of some kind of plot,
but he was satisfied at least that Brandon Russell should
remain in custody for the time being, and that was it.
Two months later, Brandon Russell changed his plea to guilty
just days before he was scheduled to go to trial.

(01:25:38):
The government never produced any additional evidence because they didn't
have to. They never had to convince a jury that
Brandon Russell was going to do anything in particular with
those explosives. They never had to explain how they knew
they'd find him near that nuclear power plant, or why
he had a car full of guns and ammunition when
they found him. Ever settled the question of whether or

(01:26:02):
not Devon Arthur's was telling the truth about Brandon Russell's intentions.
Brandon Russell pleaded guilty on the explosive charges in September
of twenty seventeen. A few months later, in December, a
seventeen year old Adam Waffin member in Virginia shot and
killed his ex girlfriend's parents. On January ninth, twenty eighteen,

(01:26:27):
Brandon Russell was sentenced to five years in prison. One
day later, on January tenth, police in California found the
body of Blaize Bernstein in a shallow grave. He'd been
murdered a week earlier by a member of Adam Wloffin.
In a matter of months, three young men connected to

(01:26:49):
the group had killed, and one of those killers is
in jail, insisting the group was planning terrorist attacks, but
the man he s said was behind these plots was
only charged with possessing and improperly storing explosive materials. Brendon

(01:27:11):
Russell's criminal case was resolved in a matter of months,
and he was already serving his sentence before there was
much movement in the case against Devon Arthur's. That case
dragged on for years. The plea agreement was finally filed
just days before the sixth anniversary of the murders. Throughout
this process, though Devon Arthur's never denied committing the murders.

(01:27:37):
But there was a problem. He'd always been a bit
of an odd kid when he was in middle school.
His parents agreed in mediation during their divorce that he
should be evaluated by a specialist, but it doesn't look
like either of his parents ever followed through on that.
On the night of the murders, he told the detective

(01:27:59):
that he thought he probably needed to go to a
hospital to get some kind of treatment, and he wished
he'd listen sooner when people told him he needed help.
He was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but there
were no other mental health diagnoses on his record prior
to the murders. Based on reports written by the doctors
who evaluated him in jail, he rapidly deteriorated after his arrest,

(01:28:24):
but there does appear to have been some pre existing
mental illness going on. In the interrogation video, he's a
little disjointed. His speech is a little pressured, but he's
lucid for the most part, and his body language is
pretty relaxed. A doctor who evaluated him in twenty twenty

(01:28:44):
wrote that Devon had developed a habit of pressing his
fists into his neck when he felt anxious. He would
apply pressure to his throat until he felt dizzy, sometimes
even losing consciousness. A TV news camera in the courtroom
recorded him doing it during at least one hearing, and
the doctor said the behavior was compulsive. He couldn't stop
doing it, even when asked by the doctor to try.

(01:29:08):
He also claimed to be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations,
and said that he would lie awake at night and
communicate with the dead even on heavy doses of antipsychotics
and sedatives. He exhibited the rapid, tangential speech of someone
who's experiencing mania. For the first few years after his arrest,

(01:29:29):
most of the doctors who met with him agreed he
was experiencing severe mental illness, and for several years the
only movement on his case was related to these competency evaluations.
He was moved back and forth between jail and a
state mental hospital a few times, and doctor after doctor
met with him and reported back to the court that

(01:29:52):
he wasn't competent to stand trial. Now, there's a difference
here between incompetent to stand trial and insane. Insane is
not a nice word, but it is a word with
a particular meaning. In a courtroom. You're not going to
go to a doctor and get diagnosed insane. That's not

(01:30:14):
really something we say anymore. But in a courtroom, someone
who is insane is not legally responsible for their actions.
That's something that you can argue at trial. Being legally
insane is not the same thing as being mentally ill.
You can be profoundly mentally ill and still legally responsible

(01:30:34):
for a crime. Someone who successfully presents an insanity defense
has to prove that at the time of the offense
they lacked the ability to understand that what they were
doing was wrong. They couldn't form criminal intent because they
just were not in the same reality as the rest
of us. And so at this stage of the case,

(01:30:57):
before it goes to trial, we're not talking about insanity.
Insanity is a trial issue, but before there can be
a trial, he has to have the mental capacity to
understand a trial, so they have to get him back
to competency. These doctors aren't making any kind of finding

(01:31:17):
about whether or not he was insane at the time
of the murders. They're just saying that right now today
he lacks the ability to communicate effectively with his lawyer,
to participate in his own defense. He doesn't know what's
going on in the courtroom right now. But after a
few years of treatment, the doctors finally agree that he's

(01:31:39):
competent to proceed and they set the case for trial.
In May of twenty twenty three, the morning the trial
was supposed to begin, he signed a plea agreement. The
state agreed to drop the murder charges down from first
degree to second degree murder, and he agreed to plead
guilty to all the charges. Earlier this year, a reporter

(01:32:04):
from Court TV interviewed Devon in prison, and in this
interview in twenty twenty five, his story isn't any clearer
than it was on the night of the murders. He's
stable now, he says, he doesn't have hallucinations anymore, and
he has his anger under control, and he sees a

(01:32:24):
psychiatrist in prison once a month, and he still believes
that he did what he had to do. The reporter
plays a clip for him of his own statements the
night of the murder, the part where he says he
did it to prevent the deaths of even more people,
and he asks him, do you still stand by that claim,

(01:32:45):
And Devin says that he does, and he gets visibly
angry with the reporter when he's pressed on the issue
of the way he's justifying these murders.

Speaker 4 (01:32:55):
The way you describe it, you're basically turning a brutal
murder into an act of heroism by saying by saying
that you were acting to save civilian lives from future
terrorist attacks.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):
Well, I certainly was.

Speaker 4 (01:33:08):
That's a way of but I wanted to agrandizing yourself, David.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
I can see where that comes from in that context.

Speaker 1 (01:33:15):
But and the thing is, I don't have any intent
to really hurt innocent people.

Speaker 2 (01:33:23):
He goes as far as to say that he has
sacrificed forty five years of his own life to stop
Adam Woffin. I won't rehash the thoughts I had about
those claims in the last episode. I don't believe him
I said that, But I spent most of this week
thinking about it, turning it over in my head, and

(01:33:47):
reading and rereading the documents that I have, And I
found two strange statements buried in the police reports from
that night. The officer who drove him from the Strip
Mall to the apartment complex so he could show her
where the bodies were wrote that during that very brief trip,
I mean it's right across the street, He asks her

(01:34:09):
if the media would want to interview him, and as
they're pulling into the parking lot in front of the condo,
he said, quote, it's just a shame I didn't get
to write my manifesto before this. Another report, written by
a different officer who later drove Devon from the crime
scene to the police station, says that Devon was talking

(01:34:32):
pretty much NonStop. From the portion of the report detailing
Devon's statements immediately after being placed in a holding cell,
the officer wrote quote Arthur's expressed how relieved he felt
because he fulfilled his mission and he can now have peace.
Arthur's made several statements throughout that he was planning to

(01:34:52):
do something in the next week or so anyway, and
he was trying to pick a target. So which is it?
Which is it? Was he insane? Did he snap because
he was being bullied? Was he heroically preventing a terrorist attack?
Was this a premeditated ideological act and for what ideology exactly?

(01:35:18):
The only person who really knows is Devon, and he's
still telling a version of this story that doesn't add up.
After last week's episode, I saw a listener comment online
that they'd encountered Devin Arthur's many years ago while playing Minecraft.

(01:35:38):
Remember Devin converted to Islam in twenty sixteen when several
members of his Minecraft server took a joke a little
too far and ended up meming themselves into a bastardized
version of Islam. I'm not a gamer. I don't know
anything about Minecraft, so I just took this as written

(01:36:01):
and didn't try to look for more information about that.
That's just a culture I don't understand. But this listener's
message got me thinking, a lot of people Devin was
gaming with back then remember him. This listener was not
the only person who have ever posted online that they
knew Devin from Minecraft. There are posts where people are

(01:36:25):
processing their shock that someone they'd known from an online
game turned out to be a murderer. So I started
looking for posts made in the immediate aftermath, and I
found some. First of all, it turns out Minecraft is

(01:36:49):
a lot more complicated than I thought. Don't laugh at me.
I don't play games, but I thought it was just
literally like legos on the computer. I thought it was
computer legos. I don't know. I didn't know there was
a whole culture with this encyclopedia's worth of lore. Devin

(01:37:10):
was active on a Minecraft server called Sivcraft, where users
play a modified version of the game that includes elements
of the game civilization. So in Sivcraft, users banded together
as nations and they do diplomacy. They go to war
against other nations in the game. I don't know. Don't
email me about Minecraft. I'm doing my best. I read

(01:37:31):
a lot of stuff about games that I didn't understand.
He eventually joined a server called Intcraft, which has similar
gameplay dynamics to sivcraft, but it was started by people
who met on four Chan, and it turns out Devin
used the same username for years, and his behavior was

(01:37:53):
weird enough that a lot of people who played sivcraft
remember him. I found on four Chan posts going as
far back as twenty thirteen that appear to be Devin
talking about Minecraft. By October of twenty fourteen, the same
month his dad kicked him out of the house for
ordering a copy of Minecom off Amazon, he's posting on

(01:38:16):
four Chan trying to recruit more users to his Minecraft server,
where he's playing as a Nazi. He posted an image
containing a swastika and what appears to be a historical
photograph of a mass grave over which he's written an
antisemitic slogan. Now again, I'm showing my ignorance of Minecraft culture,

(01:38:40):
I guess, but both Intcraft and sivcraft have kept extensive
histories of their games. There are blogs and wikis and subreddits.
And as I was reading through one of the Intcraft wikis,
because there is more than one, I kept seeing the

(01:39:01):
name of a particular user. Devin was second in command
of a group of players that called themselves Striker Gang,
named after their leader, a man playing under the username
Striker one two three ABC. Interesting maybe, but not relevant.
I'm sure Devin played with a lot of people online.

(01:39:23):
But just days after the murders, someone posted a link
to a news story about Devon on a subreddit for
a particular Minecraft server. Several reddit users replied, recalling strange
run ins they'd had with him in the game. He'd
been pretty well known for a couple of years already
for being a Nazi. People posted things like I remember

(01:39:45):
him being a little shit and sieve, but I didn't
realize he'd do anything irl, and I assumed those short
political rants were to come off as edgy. Yes, I
couldn't believe someone could on ironically be like like that.
But one user posted something very odd. The account's been deleted,

(01:40:09):
but the posts remain. He killed two of my friends
and he planned on killing me. This is a very
surreal experience. In a follow up post, the same deleted
account confirms that he was friends with the victims in
real life, not on Minecraft offline. Another user replying to

(01:40:37):
that post wrote, hope you're doing all right despite all this.
Striker Striker Striker from Minecraft was an Adam Offfen two.
So I looked for Striker in the Iron March leagues
and wouldn't you know it, he's there too. Twenty sixteen,

(01:41:01):
Striker posted on Iron March that he was one of
three Adam Waffen members in South Florida. He signed up
with his real email address from a computer with an
IP address in South Florida. Now I have to hand
it to him. This man has done an incredible job

(01:41:21):
wiping himself off the face of the Internet. But he
did leave just enough bread crumbs that appeared to connect
that Minecraft user to the Iron March poster to a
thirty seven year old middle school teacher in South Florida.
That would have made him twenty eight back in twenty sixteen,

(01:41:43):
which is actually quite old for an Adam Waffen member.
Members tended to be in their teens or early twenties,
maybe because that's the demographic that was most online in
the dark corners where the group recruited, Right, they're more impressionable,
less likely to make good decisions, less likely to have
their lives figured out. All that's true, but it was

(01:42:05):
also very intentional. Brandon Russell was explicit about this. He
preferred to recruit very young members, literal children, because a
child can't be an FBI agent. If you only recruit teenagers,
you don't have to worry that any of them are
an undercover cop. But maybe Striker made the cut because

(01:42:30):
there was just no way an undercover cop could spend
that much time pretending to lead isis on Minecraft. But
back to that Reddit post, why did Striker think Devin
planned to kill him too? Another mysterious Reddit post from
a deleted account claims that the leader of the group

(01:42:53):
talked to some people who knew Devon on Minecraft and
they allegedly told him that the murders or premeditated. The
account is deleted and the post is not very clear
where this information came from, but someone is claiming that
Devin had been talking online about a plan to kill
not only Andrew Jeremy, but several other members of the

(01:43:16):
group too. I guess we'll never really know. As far
as the hard facts go. Devin pleaded guilty to murder.
His story still shifts with every retelling. He shot them
because he was mentally ill, he shot them because they
were bullies, he shot them because he had to prevent
a terrorist attack. But In one tiny moment, before those

(01:43:41):
bodies were even cold, he told a police officer that
he'd been planning to carry out an attack that week,
and he told another officer that he wished he'd found
time to write his manifesto first. Maybe there is no
truth here, There is no actual version of the truth,
because what happened isn't something that can be made sense of.

(01:44:04):
His story changes because even he doesn't know why he
did what he did. In Minecraft, he role played sometimes
as Isis, sometimes as a national socialist on a mission
to kill communists. Sometimes he was a pony from the
My Little Pony animated series. His online fantasy bled into

(01:44:26):
real life. It wasn't enough to pretend to be an
Isis or pretend to be a Nazi in Minecraft. He
founded a real life Nazi group, and then he got
pushed out of leadership of his Nazi group for swearing
allegiance to Isis. When it came to his real world ideology,

(01:44:46):
he believed all sorts of contradictory things. Maybe he really
does believe entirely contradictory versions of his own reality too.
In the moment that he became a murderer, maybe he
believed all of it or none of it, but he'd
been thoroughly steeped in the violent rhetoric of the Nazi

(01:45:07):
group he helped create. Even if he does believe that
he was only trying to stop the group's violence, that
culture of violence is the reason that gun was in
his hands in the first place. In the end, though,
I guess he did kind of prevent something. Brandon Russell's

(01:45:31):
bomb making workshop was discovered, he was arrested before he
got a chance to do whatever he may or may
not have been planning to do in South Florida at
that nuclear power plant. But Brandon Russell's commitment to kicking
off the race war only intensified during his years in prison,
and within months of his release, he was back online

(01:45:53):
chatting with impressionable young people about how to blow up
electrical transformers. Brandon Russell was recently sentenced to twenty years
in prison. Devin Arthur's is serving his forty five year
sentence in Florida. He spends a lot of his time
these days in the prison law library. As recently as

(01:46:13):
last month, he was filing handwritten motions for postconviction relief,
claiming his attorneys failed him by not presenting more mitigating
evidence at sentencing. For what it is worth, I don't
think any version of the truth would have helped him there.
Florida law didn't really give the judge any discretion to
have handed down a lighter sentence even if mitigation evidence

(01:46:35):
had been presented. But I'll keep an eye on the
docket just to see if he gets that evidentiary hearing
he's been asking for. Maybe this time he'll have a
new version of the truth. There are a few updates

(01:47:06):
to this story. Again, these episodes were originally written and
aired in August of twenty twenty five, right around the
time that Devin Arthur's was trying unsuccessfully to get resentenced
on his murder charges, and Brandon Russell had very recently
been sentenced in his federal case. As far as Devin's

(01:47:28):
there actually isn't much to say. He is serving his
pair of forty five year sentences for a second degree murder.
Florida Department of Corrections records show that he is currently
incarcerated at Graceville Correctional Facility somewhere in the Florida Panhandle,
and he's being held under close custody, a designation that

(01:47:48):
refers to an increased level of security, usually associated with
someone who's having some behavior problems in jail. Last summer,
a judge and denied his motion for another hearing on
post conviction relief, and there are no new filings in
his case after that. He seems to be out of

(01:48:09):
options when it comes to appealing his sentence, and he
has an expected release date of May seventh, twenty sixty two.
Brandon Russell, on the other hand, is keeping very busy
in prison. He is currently appealing his federal conviction and
twenty year sentence for a plot to blow up the

(01:48:29):
power grid. Now, for a federal criminal appeal, you can't
just come to a new judge and say, hey, I
didn't like how that trial went, let me try again.
I don't think that was the right outcome. Right, You're
not just saying the jury decided this wrong. Appeals have
to argue that the trial itself was flawed in some way.

(01:48:52):
You have to make an argument that there was some
kind of specific legal flaw in your trial. Your rights
were violated, your lawyer was drunk and passed out on
the floor during jury selection. A judge ruled improperly on
a pre trial motion, and there was evidence admitted that
should have been kept out something like that. And in
Brandon Russell's case, his attorney is arguing that the trial

(01:49:14):
court aired in its ruling on a defense motion to
compel the government to disclose information about whether and to
what degree the government had been monitoring and intercepting Brandon
Russell's communications with a foreign national. It's not an argument

(01:49:35):
about a particular piece of evidence. They're not arguing about
the validity of a warrant or some piece of evidence
that the jury saw, because there was no warrant and
that jury never saw anything about this. What the defense
wanted here was to view classified information collected pursuant to

(01:49:56):
Section seven oh two of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance or FISA.
FISA allows US intelligence to monitor and surveil people who
are not Americans. It's for foreign intelligence foreign threats, monitoring
things like espionage and terrorism, but not domestic terrorism, not

(01:50:21):
domestic terrorism committed by Americans. It has to be foreign
in origin. It can't be used to surveil US citizens,
and it isn't supposed to be used for what's called
reverse targeting. It's not meant to be a loophole for
warrantless wire taps on US citizens by surveilling their foreign contacts,

(01:50:43):
where the actual intention is to collect information about an American.
Does that happen yet? It seems like it does. It's
kind of a thorny issue, and it's very opaque. And
in early twenty twenty four, amid Congressional debates on the
merits of the FISA program, then FBI Director Christopher Ray

(01:51:05):
made some public statements. He said the FBI had foiled
an international terror plot using information collected through PISA's Section
seven oh two digital surveillance program. And the statement was
obviously political, right, Congress is set to vote on renewing FISA,
and the FBI is very invested in keeping their access

(01:51:27):
to this warrantless digital dragnet intact. So he trotted out
some vague examples of sinister sounding plots that they had
prevented using this tool that they need. Right, he's justifying
access to this tool. An FBI official told reporters that quote,
the ability to search the Section seven oh two database

(01:51:49):
without a court order showed that a person located inside
the US was in regular contact with an unspecified foreign
terrorist group had acquired the means to conduct an attack
and had already identified specific targets in the US end quote.
And so the FBI says that they were able to

(01:52:10):
foil that plot using access to the PISA database, and
this plot was vaguely described as potentially imminent and an
attack on critical infrastructure in the United States. But Ray
didn't provide much more detail on the exact nature of

(01:52:31):
this foiled plot. He didn't say where it was planned
to occur, if arrest had been made, if charges had
been filed. It was a lot of political theater that
took place during congressional debates about phisory authorization. But for
Brandon Russell's lawyers, it seemed obvious what the FBI is

(01:52:53):
talking about here. It seemed like the FBI director was
talking about their client. He's out there admitting that a
US citizen had been involved in some kind of plot
picked up by FISA monitoring, which isn't intended for surveillance
of citizens. And when information derived from PISA sources is

(01:53:13):
used in a criminal prosecution of an American, the government
has to tell them that they have to inform the
defense that this is in play. And so now they're thinking, well,
he's talking about us and nobody told us that, so
they filed a motion to compel. They went to the
court and they said, hey, it sounds like he's talking
about my client. And if the FBI is saying they

(01:53:37):
used FISA to foil a plot to attack infrastructure in
twenty twenty three, well this is the only case they
could be talking about. They didn't say his name, but
it has to be him, because who else is sitting
in jail right now for plotting a terrorist attack on
US infrastructure? And if it's him, they have to tell us.
And the trial court denied this motion. The judge reviewed

(01:54:01):
this classified information privately and they said, basically, you're wrong.
You don't have any legal right to know what's in here,
and it's not going to show up in your trial,
so don't worry about it. The judge didn't exactly say
the stuff in the file is definitely not about your client.

(01:54:22):
He just said that whatever was in those classified files
of documents, it didn't trigger the government's legal duty to
notify the defense about it. Whatever it was, it wasn't
used to trial. But god is the basis for his appeal.
Brandon Russell's attorneys are arguing that this pre trial ruling

(01:54:46):
was in error that it was a violation of his rights.
Both parties have filed their opening briefs, and Russell's reply
brief is actually due later this week. It seems like
a pretty uphill battle as far as a peals go.
I mean, FISA stuff is always very opaque and profoundly
stacked against the defendant in any case. And if they

(01:55:09):
didn't even rely on any possible fiz AT drived evidence
at trial, I just I think the government will prevail
in arguing that it's not relevant. Also, there was plenty
of evidence in this trial he made a lot of
very incriminating statements to a federal informant. He would have
ended up convicted either way, and that's a powerful factor

(01:55:31):
in considering whether there's a meaningful appellate issue here. And look,
going out on a limb here. I'm not a lawyer,
but I don't think it's a great idea to come
to the court and say whatever they heard me saying
on the phone to that foreign terrorist organization, it's unfair
for them to have heard it, right, Because if he

(01:55:52):
is admitting that there's a possibility of FISA material here,
it sounds like he knows that's what it would be.
It sounds like he knows which foreign terrorist group he
was on the phone with. I don't know that that's
going to help him in the long run. And in
addition to his legal appeal, Brandon Russell is keeping up

(01:56:13):
with his fans. He has spent almost his entire adult
life in prison at this point, so he's had to
get a little creative when it comes to running a
Nazi terror group from a federal prison, and during his
last stint behind bars, he somehow managed to release a
video statement to Adam Waffen supporters. This time around, there

(01:56:37):
isn't really an Adam Waffen anymore, but its founder does
still have supporters and they still believe all the same things.
He's a contributor to a bi monthly newsletter put out
by The American Futurist, a Nazi blog run by former
Adam Waffen members. There's only been seven issues so far

(01:57:00):
of the White Prison newsletter, and it looks like issue
eight was supposed to come out last month, but they
haven't said anything about why it's late. It's pretty classic stuff.
Christian identity groups, the Aryan Nations, various clan groups. They've
all done this. Sending your Nazi newsletter to people in
prison is a time honored tradition, and almost every old

(01:57:24):
right wing extremist newsletter I've ever read has some page
in it with a call to action about supporting the
movement's political prisoners. I'm thinking most specifically of old issues
of Tom Metzger's White Arean Resistance. There was always a
pow section with the addresses of old members of the Order,
so you could write them in prison or send them
a few bucks for ramen. Connecting with incarcerated white nationalists

(01:57:49):
keeps them connected to the movement, but it also encourages
younger members to see that kind of criminal conduct as heroic.
Right the addresses you find in the back of these
old newsletters, it's people like David Lane. You're writing to
these political prisoners who are movement heroes, and with nothing

(01:58:09):
better to do, they write back, and it really encourages involvement.
It can provide a form of mentorship and networking opportunities.
And if you send a guy inside a stack of newsletters,
he'll hand them out and that can be a good
recruitment tool. In the online chats for the Right Prison Newsletter,

(01:58:36):
the group posted a screenshot of what they claim is
an email message from Robert Bauers, the Pittsburgh Tree of
Life synagogue shooter. He's grateful to have received the reading material,
and he says he'll hand it out to like minded
people in prison. Although he does seem to be declining

(01:58:57):
an offer to write an article for the next issue,
he says he's not much of a writer. Most of
the issues are packed with filler. In one of them,
there's a full five pages of some decades old republished
essay from William Luther Pierce. In another, there is the
full text of the lyrics to a Screwdriver song. There

(01:59:19):
are a lot of pictures, drawings, clip art photos of
Brandon Russell. After Charlie Kirk was murdered, they read an
article favorably comparing Kirk to Horace Bessel, the member of
the Sturmob Tylong whose murder was turned into propaganda by
the Nazi Party in the thirties, and the author hopes
that Kirk's assassination might make mainstream conservatives more open to

(01:59:43):
allying with fascists. And there are occasional guest essays from
anonymous readers who identify themselves only as National Socialist Federal prisoners,
so that's not just me calling everyone a Nazi their
self identifying, they're calling themselves not. And on the back
cover you can tear off the reader's survey to send

(02:00:04):
in your input on important questions like should the articles
be longer or shorter, And you can order more copies
of the newsletter for your friends or request copies of
various Nazi essays from their limited catalog. Orders for additional
materials are to be paid for in stamps, which is
a currency that would be available to their incarcerated audience.

(02:00:29):
And every issue has a puzzle, a fun activity to
do while you're wiling away the hours in your cell.
The word searches must not have been a big hit
because after the first two issues they switched to some
sort of spatial logic puzzle with numbers in circles. I
don't really know what the name of that is. Whoever

(02:00:50):
wrote the word search clues just sucks at it. I mean,
they didn't acknowledge the change, but I think there must
have been complaints because these were not fun. Word searches
is the number of months Hitler was in prison, the
month of the year that Mine kamf was published. I mean,
come on, that's not even fun Nazi trivia, and some

(02:01:11):
of them are straight up weird. Twelve down, the type
of spirit that should be adopted to resist anti white attacks.
The answer is warrior. Apparently, you must adopt a warrior
spirit to resist the anti white attacks. And three across,

(02:01:34):
the most precious possession you have in this world? Why
is the answer? People? The most precious possession you have
as people? At least it is technically solvable if you
read it cover to cover. The answers are there. And
that last one apparently is part of a Hitler quote

(02:01:54):
that appeared earlier in the issue. Brendon Russell is currently
serving his twenty year sentence at FCI Cumberland, a federal
prison in Maryland. Other notable Cumberland alums include lobbyist Jack
Abramoff and oath Keeper's founder Stuart Rhodes. These days, Cumberland
is also home to Matt Hale, the leader of the

(02:02:17):
white supremacist fake religion, The Church of the Creator. He's
most of the way through a forty year sentence for
encouraging a federal informant to assassinate a judge. I wonder
if he and Brandon hang out Weird Little Guys as

(02:02:47):
a production of coolshone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
and recorded by me, Molly Conger Prig. Executive producers are
Sophie Lectreman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed
by B Brad Dickard. You can email me that Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.

(02:03:07):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.

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