THE JOHN DOE TIMES
Volume IV, No. 8
28 February 1997
IN THIS ISSUE:
*********************************************
The John Doe Times is an on-line, electronic newsletter published by the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment (Constitutional Militia) and friends. We are a proud and active member of the "Right Wing Media Cabal", Internet Division. In a hurry (again). Sic Semper Rodentia.
********************************************
Fugitive Faces Firearms Charges
26 February 1997
The Associated Press
By MARK JEWELL
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - One of two brothers who have been the subjects of a nationwide manhunt since a videotaped shootout with Ohio police officers was indicted here Tuesday on federal firearms counts.
Chevie O'Brien Kehoe, 24, was charged with possessing a semiautomatic pistol and an assault-style rifle stolen from William Mueller, an Arkansas gun dealer who was slain last year along with his wife and daughter.
Robert L. Harper, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Spokane, said it was premature to call Kehoe a suspect in the unsolved slayings.
Kehoe also was charged with possessing an unregistered machine gun - a .223-caliber AR-15 rifle he illegally converted into an assault weapon, Harper said.
Investigators believe the pistol and rifle that were registered to Mueller somehow ended up in the possession of a Spokane-area gun dealer and were stolen from the dealer by Kehoe, Harper said.
Agents recovered the stolen guns and are continuing to investigate the recent theft of other firearms from local gun dealers, Harper said.
Kehoe and his 20-year-old brother Cheyne C. Kehoe allegedly fired on police officers during two clashes on Feb. 15 about 50 miles northeast of Cincinnati. The officers were not hurt.
Both shootouts were filmed, and videotapes of the clashes have been aired on television news programs. The brothers remain at large and are considered armed and dangerous, the FBI says.
Chevie Kehoe formerly lived in Colville, about 60 miles north of Spokane, and is thought to be accompanied by his wife, Karena Gumm, 23, and their three children, all younger than 5, the FBI said. Cheyne Kehoe is believed to be accompanied by his wife, Tanna Wilburn, who is in her early 20s, and a son born last July.
Authorities believe Chevie Kehoe left Colville after making a Spokane woman his second wife in a polygamous relationship in July 1993. They reportedly were married at the Aryan Nations compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, in front of Kehoe's pregnant first wife.
AP-NY-02-26-97 0000EST
=====================================================================
Mark Fazlollah Writes Some Interesting Things About John Doe #2 & Andy the German.
Philadelphia Inquirer: Page One
Friday, 28 February 1997
Eagle Scout may have been soldier of far right
Michael Brescia, from Andorra, seemed an all-American college student. But prosecutors say appearances deceive.
By Mark Fazlollah
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
He was an Eagle Scout, president of his fraternity at La Salle University, an accounting major who worked as a bookkeeper on the side to help pay the bills.
Michael Brescia grew up in a trim rancher in the city's Andorra section. His father is a battalion chief in the Fire Department. His mother was president of a local civic group. Theirs was a family right out of Leave It to Beaver, to judge from appearances.
Appearances deceive, say federal prosecutors. They describe the 24-year-old Brescia as an ardent soldier of the extreme right, a man enamored of guns, conspiracy theories and white-supremacist ideology who ultimately took up arms for the cause.
A federal grand jury in Philadelphia indicted Brescia last month on charges that he helped plot seven Midwest bank robberies to finance the activities of white-separatist groups. He has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors consider Brescia so dangerous that they filed an emergency appeal when a federal magistrate granted him bail. A judge granted the appeal, ordering Brescia held without bail at an undisclosed location.
Brian J. McMonagle, a Philadelphia lawyer who briefly represented Brescia, said the young man was not involved in the robberies and was not a white separatist.
``He comes from a wonderful family,'' McMonagle said. ``These are decent, law-abiding, churchgoing people who believe in racial equality and everything else.''
Brescia's new court-appointed lawyer, Edward J. Daly, did not respond to a request for comment. His parents, William and Kathy Brescia, declined requests for an interview.
Neighbors, acquaintances and former classmates say Brescia flirted with ultra-right ideas for years and cultivated an image as a dangerous loner. In his 1990 high school yearbook, he chose this slogan to appear beside his name: ``Spill the blood, dude.''
**************************************
JDT Commentary: Words that may be engraved on his tombstone if he ever receives the justice he deserves for Oklahoma City.
**************************************
The aspiring rock musician added this exhortation: ``Buy my records or you will die.''
**************************************
JDT Commentary: So like his idol, the failed painter Adolf, if Mikey had been an artistic success with his music we might have been spared the butchery of holocausts small and large?
**************************************
At La Salle, students and school officials say he hung out with skinheads, handed out hate literature, and was given to flights of bizarre rhetoric.
It was while at La Salle, authorities say, that Brescia's journey to the fringes of the far right began in earnest. He got to know Scott Stedeford, a singer/songwriter from Ardmore who played in skinhead bands, and Kevin McCarthy, a skinhead from the city's Bustleton section, investigators say.
Those two introduced Brescia to Mark William Thomas, a neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader, said FBI agent Paul Hendrickson, who testified at a recent court hearing. Thomas, 47, a guru to racial extremists across the country, has hosted separatist rallies at his farm outside Allentown.
At Thomas' urging, authorities say, Brescia moved to Elohim City, a white-separatist compound in eastern Oklahoma. He stayed there for nearly two years and became engaged to a relative of Robert Millar, the 71-year-old, Scripture-quoting patriarch of Elohim City.
By the time Brescia left the compound in 1995, investigators say, he, Stedeford and McCarthy were active in the Aryan Republican Army, a self-styled right-wing guerrilla group modeled after the Irish Republican Army. Prosecutors say the group committed 22 robberies of Midwest banks in 1994 and 1995, stealing more than $250,000.
The army's stated principles are that racial minorities are subhuman, that Jews are ``Satan's spawn,'' that whites of northern European descent are ``chosen people,'' and that a U.N.-led ``New World Order'' threatens freedom in the United States.
A two-hour video titled ``The Aryan Republican Army Presents: The Armed Struggle Underground'' was confiscated by FBI agents last year in a raid on one of the gang's safe houses.
On the tape, a man in a ski mask, identified by the FBI as Peter Langan, the son of a CIA agent from Washington, is heard spewing racist rhetoric. ``In solidarity with our Serbian brothers, we understand the meaning of ethnic cleansing,'' says the masked man, who calls himself ``Commander Pedro.''
The camera then focuses on two crude caricatures -- one of a black man, with the word deport beneath it, and one of a Hasidic Jew, with the word exterminate next to it.
Typical of the gang's exploits, authorities say, was a bank heist in Madison, Wis., on Aug. 30, 1995. According to the federal indictment, Brescia, Stedeford, McCarthy, Langan, and a fifth man, Richard Lee Guthrie Jr., participated.
Brescia carried a black-powder pipe bomb into a Bank One branch and threatened customers and employees with a 9mm pistol, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Schwartz said during a recent court hearing in Philadelphia. The robbery netted $9,845.
Stedeford, 28, and Langan, 38, have been convicted of robbery charges stemming from the string of Midwest bank stickups. Stedeford was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Langan is awaiting sentencing. McCarthy, 19, pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government. Guthrie, 38, from the Washington area, hanged himself in his jail cell after confessing last summer.
Thomas pleaded guilty last week to helping plot seven of the 22 robberies and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert E. Goldman, one of the prosecutors, declined to discuss Thomas' cooperation.
Brescia has maintained his innocence.
He enrolled at La Salle University in 1990 and joined Delta Sigma Pi, a 15-member fraternity for business students. He was briefly its president in 1993.
Thomas Kruezi, a former Delta Sigma Pi brother, said he saw two sides to Brescia -- an intelligent accounting student and an ardent right-winger.
Though Brescia did well in his studies, he voiced ``very weird views for a finance major,'' said Kruezi. He recalled Brescia saying that ``the Federal Reserve controls the whole world.''
Another fraternity brother, Joseph Csercsevitz, said he once visited Brescia at an off-campus house and saw a pistol and a shoe box full of ammunition in his room. Two ``strange'' skinheads were visiting Brescia, he said.
``Before, I thought it was all talk, but this was real,'' said Csercsevitz.
Delta Sigma Pi warned Brescia it would expel him if he was involved in racist activities, said fraternity member George Ralko.
Brescia dropped out of La Salle in June 1993 after school authorities discovered that he was distributing white-supremacist literature on campus.
That summer, he moved to Elohim City, an armed 1,000-acre compound in eastern Oklahoma's Brushy Mountain foothills. He shared a one-story house behind the compound's chapel with Andreas Strassmeir, a former German army lieutenant and weapons buff, said Millar, founder of the separatist community.
``Strassmeir and Brescia were buddies,'' he said.
*******************************************
JDT Commentary: And ever so much more.
*******************************************
Strassmeir's father was a top aide to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl until 1991. Strassmeir, 37, served seven years in the German army, until 1989. He then moved to the United States and drifted to Elohim City about 1992. He left the compound in 1995 and now lives in Berlin. In a phone interview last week, Strassmeir said he liked Brescia because ``he had a lot of self-confidence'' and was ``a smart guy'' -- though always broke.
****************************************
JDT Commentary: Oh, he's smart as a whip all right. Some claim genius-level. Dennis Mahon thinks that if he beats this rap (unlikely) or, like Hitler at Landsberg Prison, comes out in a few years having had time to think through his mistakes, that Mikey could be the next "Great Leader" (read: Fuhrer) of the American racist movement. Think of that, a Catholic-raised boy of Italian descent standing on the dais in the Nuremberg-like rallies of the 21st century, accepting the adulation of millions of swastika-wearing Americans..... Somewhere Benito Mussolini would be smiling.
****************************************
``He never had any money,'' said Strassmeir, speaking in almost unaccented English, spiced with American idioms. ``He had to borrow money to pay the electric bill.''
******************************************
JDT Commentary: Andy's "speaking in almost unaccented English" these days, is he? This dovetails with the testimony of the Oklahoma State cop who pulled him over outside Elohim City and had his car impounded, but is at odds with the heavily-accented English Strassmeir would use with many others, including news media interviews. I guess like most good intelligence operatives he can turn it on and off to suit his needs. Maybe he slipped with Fazlollah. An interesting tidbit nonetheless. Oh, one more thing....."he had to borrow money to pay the electric bill.." Yet right after coming back from robbing the bank with Commander Pedro and the Lost Planet Aryans he gets in an argument with Millar and has enough money to leave Elohim and go pay rent to George Eaton, go to college in Fort Smith, etc. (Where is old George these days?). Was the falling out about the bank robbery money? Did Mikey offer some to Millar (who refused out of fear of going to jail), or was his refusal to share the cause of the "falling out"?
******************************************
Millar and former residents of Elohim City said Brescia was building his own house in the compound. In June 1995, his parents visited for several days, Millar said.
``He didn't seem to have much. But I think his dad was helping him,'' Millar said. ``His dad and mother are very nice. They came out here and helped Mike work on the building for three or four days.''
*******************************************
JDT Commentary: So I guess there's not much doubt that Mama and Papa knew about Elohim City's "eccentric" racial philosophies, though the darker side of what's in the bunkers would likely have been shielded from them. Still, one wonders what they thought of the severe post-bombing paranoia that was the everyday reality at Elohim City.
******************************************
Millar said that he and Brescia eventually had a falling-out, and that Brescia left in August 1995 at his request. Brescia was ``more militant than I think I am,'' Millar said.
Before leaving, Brescia transferred the title of his 1991 Toyota pickup truck into a fictitious name, according to documents put in evidence by federal prosecutors. Prosecutors said in court recently that the ruse was a preparation for the Bank One robbery, meant to make it harder for authorities to trace the vehicle.
In late August 1995, Stedeford met Brescia near Elohim City, the federal indictment says. The two drove to Missouri and hooked up with Langan, Guthrie and McCarthy, and the group traveled to Madison, Wis., the indictment says.
After the Bank One robbery, Brescia lived for a time near Fort Smith, Ark., just across the state line from Elohim City, and took some college courses with Millar's step-granddaughter, Esther Den Hartog -- now Brescia's fiancee.
He finished one semester, returned to his parents' home, and landed a job as a bookkeeper at Intelligent Electronics in Exton. Last fall, he went back to La Salle and started taking night classes.
Brescia was arrested by FBI agents Jan. 30. At a hearing days later, McMonagle, his defense lawyer, argued that he should be freed immediately. He said that Brescia had been a student in Arkansas, and that the government's evidence against him was tainted because it came from McCarthy -- who, McMonagle said, had used drugs and undergone psychological counseling.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter B. Scuderi ordered Brescia released in the custody of his parents. Prosecutors immediately appealed, saying there was no way to ensure that Brescia would not obtain weapons.
At an appeal hearing, 16 relatives and family friends -- most of them elderly Andorra residents -- appeared in court to support Brescia. They told U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter that Brescia was not a danger to the community.
Schwartz, the assistant U.S. attorney, said at the hearing that an unidentified witness had told investigators that Brescia had once threatened to shoot it out with the FBI if agents tried to arrest him.
*******************************************
JDT Commentary: Too bad he didn't try. Of course, given the general level of FBI marksmanship displayed at the Langan "arrest/assassination attempt", he may not have been in any danger if he had tried.
*******************************************
The judge ruled: Brescia would stay in prison.
Inquirer Staff Writer Michael Matza contributed to this report.
