THE JOHN DOE TIMES
14 January 1997
VOL. III, No. 3
IN THIS ISSUE: J.D. CASH'S SERIES ON "THE MOVEMENT" CONTINUED. OR: WAS TIM McVEIGH A MEMBER OF THE MIDWEST BANK BANDITS?
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Regular readers of the John Doe Times are used to our, shall we say, sporadic, distribution schedule. Of late, we have been falling even farther behind thanks to off-the-Net activities, illnesses, etc. Well, hold onto your hats, folks, because the Oklahoma City story is about to get a whole lot more interesting-- and better known. We will try to keep up with breaking events, and if we lose some of our style in the interests of substance and timeliness, we're sure you won't mind. But for our past tardiness, we humbly apologize. -- Mike Vanderboegh, Editor.
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John Cash's series on "The Movement" continued, with the end of Part Two:
McCurtain Daily Gazette, 28 December 1996.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE, Part Two, Continued:
As a conflagration enveloped the house, agents waited anxiously for Mathews to surrender. He never did.
The following morning, the FBI surveyed the charred remains. There they found the badly burned body of Robert Jay Mathews.
His "Bruders Scheigen" medallion had melted and was imbedded in his chest cavity. It seemed to symbolize Mathews' own version of Valhalla.
The Order Flounders
Following Mathews' death and the arrest of the other members, "The Order" completely crumbled.
Twenty four members were indicted by a grand jury in Seattle. By the time the trial began in the fall of 1985, 12 had already pled guilty. When verdicts were announced for the others, 10 more were headed to prison.
But Mathews' fiery death in battle, replete with its "Gotterdamerung" German-mythic overtones, served to male him a martyr in the cause.....and to keep alive the embers of the white separatist movement.
END OF PART TWO.
McCurtain Daily Gazette
29 December 1996
REBELS WITH A CAUSE, PART 3: THE ARYAN REPUBLICAN ARMY
By J.D. Cash with Jeff Holladay.
For nearly a decade, federal authorities believed "The Order" had perished with the violent death of Robert Jay Mathews in 1984.
Many believed the organization existed only in the fiction of William Pierce's "Turner Diaries".... a make believe game or robbery and genocide between the covers of a racist paperback book.
Yet as events were to demonstrate, "The Order" was only nascent, not dead.
The organizer this time seemed an unlikely candidate, the son of a former CIA agent who was apparently sprung from jail to be an undercover agent for a federal agency.
His name is Petere K.M. Langan-- or "Commander Pedro" as he came to be known by his colleagues. Langan is said to have begun organizing his "army" shortly after his release from jail in August, 1993.
How he got released in the first place is singularly curious.
Langan was being held on charges related to a 1992 armed robbery of a Pizza Hut in Livonia, Ga., when a strange opportunity came his way.
According to a sworn affidavit filed by FBI Agent Kenneth C. Howard, Langan agreed to be an informant for the Secret Service in return for his release from Georgia custody.
That statement said the Secret Service was seeking information on far right-wing militant groups-- in particular one Richard Lee Guthrie, Jr., a court-martialed ex-Navy Seal and an old friend of Langan's from Maryland.
After accepting the deal, Lanagan was sprung from jail and set up in Ohio, where he was to cooperate with authorities in locating Guthrie. But somewhere along the line, the agreement went awry.
Secret Service Agent Dick Rathnell summed up the fiasco this way: "Our main interest was to find if there was an interest to harm the President or overthrow the government....We didn't know they were these bank robbers."
For his part, "Commander Pedro" did locate his old friend Guthrie. Soon afterward, the pair had a "safe house" in Pittsburg, Kan., from which they are alleged to have begun a crime spree.
Bank Robberies Begin
That crime spree of bank robberies in the Midwest was so prolific that authorities likened it to the incredible record of the Jesse James Gang more than a century earlier. Employing cheap used cars and disguises that included Bill Clinton masks, hard hats, T-shirts with FBI or ATF logos and even a Santa Claus suit, two gang members would enter a bank heavily armed while a third waited in the getaway car.
Then, while holding employees and customers at bay, one member would vault the counter and clean out the drawers. During these heists, the men would speak to each other in gibberish as they went through a well-rehearsed routine, trying to make those present think they were foreigners.
When finished, a member of the gang would leave a bomb at the bank with instructions not to activate the alarms. FBI spokesman Larry Holmquist said the pipe bombs left at the crime scene were usually small ones with either no explosives or designed to do little damage. No one was ever injured in the robbery spree, Holmquist said, and gang members often displayed a wry sense of humor.
In one such episode, the gang left a gold pipe bomb nestled inside an Easter basket with a twinkie. The bank robbers also had a perverse sense of fun.
When authorities did eventually locate the gang's abandoned getaway car, they'd often find it had purchased in the name of various FBI agents.
Using a variety of aliases obtained from blank stolen birth certificates, the men obtained Social Security numbers and drivers licenses. The new identification was used to travel widely between safe houses and motels, casing and robbing banks and leaving their gear and weapons in storage lockers around the nation.
They were cocky and not above poking fun at their pursuers. On several occasions, the gang even sent letters and cartoons to newspapers mocking the FBI. They signed themselves the "Midwest Bank Robbers."
But this past January, the FBI caught and arrested Richard Guthrie after a two-mile chase through Cincinnati, Ohio, ending when his vehicle crashed into a snowdrift. Three days later, Langan's rented house in Columbus was under surveillance by a team of agents. When he emerged, the neighborhood erupted in gunfire.
He was finally arrested after surviving a hail of bullets from FBI agents, which Lanagn likened more to an assassination attempt than an arrest. A pre-trial hearing later vindicated his assertion that he had never fired at FBI agents.
An FBI spokesman told media members that, "We had information that (Langan) wouldn't be taken alive."
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Transcriber's Note: Information from whom? Louis Freeh?
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Partnership Collapses
During a subsequent hearing, Langan denied taking part in any bank robberies and told the judge he wanted to be referred to as "Commander Pedro". He alluded to himself as "just another innocent person caught up in the tyrannical legal system...Power to the People! Up (with) the Revolution!"
Ironically, those rallying cries were the same used two decades earlier by black militants.
But Langan made it abundantly clear that he was a white militant-- calling himself the founder of the Aryan Republican Army. He told the judge its mission was to overthrow the government and "set free the oppressed people of North America."
Separately, Richard Guthrie indicated that he wanted to be a bit more cooperative. And after entering into a plea bargain, Guthrie's information led to the arrests of alleged fellow gang members Kevin McCarthy and Scott Stedeford near Philadelphia in May.
To members of the media, Richard Guthrie confirmed that some of the unrecovered money from the bank heists was "spread around" the white separatist movement. He also told reporters his deal with the government included a promise to provide them with information about organizations "whose goal is the overthrow of the U.S. government or to engage in domestic terrorism."
But how much information the government actually got from Guthrie is not publicly known-- and may never be.
For just nine days after signing the plea agreement-- and only hours after telling a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that he intended to write a tell-all book that "would go a lot further into what we were really doing," Guthrie died.
He was found hanged in his jail cell from his bed sheets.
Cause of death? It has been listed, officially, as suicide.
END OF PART THREE
McCurtain Daily Gazette, 31 December, 1996.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE, Part Four: An Ex-Wife's Suspicions In The OKBOMB Case.
By J.D. Cash with Jeff Holladay.
Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, federal investigators publicly speculated in a New York Times story that bombing suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were somehow connected to the Midwestern bank robbery spree.
Terry Nichols' ex-wife, Lana Padilla, mentions several times in her book, "By Blood Betrayed," that she suspects Michols and McVeigh were involved with the gang. A reliable source familiar with the investigation confirmed that admitted co-conspirator Michael Fortier told the FBI that ex-army buddy Tim McVeigh said in February 1995 that he (McVeigh) was going to Colorado to join "The Order."
Confirming the re-emergence of "The Order", a search of the Columbus, Ohio, "safehouse" of Peter Langan yielded a videotape made by gang members for recruiting purposes. That eveidence, along with statements by a former friend of Langan and Guthrie, supports the notion that the Midwest Bank Bandits had indeed formed a new "Order".
Appearing on the video with a black knit ski mask pulled down across his face, Langan explained that his "army" is made up of a number of cells that function independently but with common goals.
And in what may or may not be a coincidence, that video tape-- completed around January, 1995-- warns that federal buildings may have to be bombed and that civilian casualties should be expected.
Lanagan asserted that his group is dedicated to the eradication of federal "whores" and all non-white and non-Christian peoples. Holding up a book that Timothy McVeigh sold at gunshows around the country, Langan tells potential recruits to read "The Turner Diaries" to better understand the coming revolution.
Also during the show-and-tell session, Langan displays a copy of "The Silent Brotherhood" and recomends it for the authors' detailed account of Bob Mathews' "Order."
Expected to be a key witness for the government in the upcoming trial of Commander Pedro is fellow who was once considered a close friend of the professed revolutionary-- Shawn Kenny of Cincinnati, Ohio. He provided the FBI the tip that led to Guthrie's and Langan's arrests last January.
According to court transcripts at the Stedeford trial in Des Moines, Iowa, Kenny told prosecutors that he met with Langan at a Christian Identity meeting in 1991. Describing his close relationship with Guthrie and Langan, Kenny explained to the court that he had accompanied the pair when they cased banks in Ohio and armored cars in Arkansas.
Kenney said Langan boasted that his gang was modeled after the group founded by Robert Mathews-- "The Order."
Beyond these links, and those in Lana Padilla's account in her book, is there any solid evidence that McVeigh and /or Nichols had any associations with gang members? Or that they received any of the stolen $250,000?
The Oklahoma City federal grand jury's final report concluded that the Oklahoma City bombing was financed by a gun robbery in Arkansas on November 5, 1994. Yet, federal authorities have said that all the components for the alleged bomb were already purchased or stolen by the date of the Arkasas robbery.
Moreover, witnesses have placed McVeigh hundreds of miles from Arkansas on the date of the crime. (Nichols' attorneys won't discuss whether their client has a similar alibi.)
Perhaps the most pointed and pertinent question though, is, how McVeigh and Nichols could have supported themselves and yet traveled so extensively during 1994 and 1995.
Records indicate that Nichols and his wife traveled to the Phillipines on numerous occasions prior to the bombing. And telephone calling card and motel registrations show that McVeigh and Nichols, sometimes together but often independently, crisscrossed the United States on a regular basis in the year before the Oklahoma City bombing.
All of these trips suggest that the pair required substantial sources of funds-- funds that their spotty employment records and gun show business would not likely fully explain.
Moreover, the telephone and motel reords show an inexplicable pattern: Of the 12 bank robberies that happened before the bombing, McVeigh's whereabouts are unknown for a few days BEFORE and AFTER 11 of those heists.
There is yet another suggestive event revealed by Lana Padilla about her ex-husband Terry Nichols. She told federal investigators that a few days after her ex-husband went on a November, 1994, trip to the Phillipines, she checked a Las Vegas storage locker rented by Terry Nichols.
She said it contained more than $60,000 in silver bullion-- along with wigs and masks. And the same week, she also later told investigators, she discovered a bag containing $20,000 that Nichols had taped to the back of her kitchen utensil drawer.
When Richard Guthrie was alive, there was a tantalizing possibility that the puzzle might fall into place. But since his death, attention has shifted to any testimony Kevin McCarthy-- another of the alleged Midwest Bank Bandits-- might provide.
His testimony could possibly be the nexus between the Aryan Republican Army and the McVeigh-Nichols clique.
