Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. A little after six a m. On
Speaker 1: June twenty fifth, two thousand and nine, there was a
Speaker 1: knock at the door. Dennis Mayhan looked outside and saw
Speaker 1: deputies from the Ogle County Sheriff's Office standing on the
Speaker 1: stoop of his parents farmhouse, but he said he wasn't
Speaker 1: coming out unless they had a warrant. A deputy held
Speaker 1: up the paperwork copies of arrest warrants and search warrants
Speaker 1: for the property, but Dennis still wouldn't open the door.
Speaker 1: Dennis Mayhan and his twin brother Daniel, were nearly sixty
Speaker 1: years old, and neither man had a criminal record until
Speaker 1: that day. Their elderly parents were asleep in their beds upstairs,
Speaker 1: but agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Speaker 1: had briefed the deputies that morning before they all set
Speaker 1: out for the Mayhon farm. Dennis had once told their
Speaker 1: confidential informant quote, as long as I have my gun
Speaker 1: and my ammunition, my final act will be a total, complete,
Speaker 1: violent act against the government. I'm going to be dying
Speaker 1: with the gun in my hands. He was cordial enough
Speaker 1: at the door, but as the sound of his footsteps
Speaker 1: were seated the officers saw the blinds go up in
Speaker 1: an upstairs window. The officers scattered, fearing the brothers had
Speaker 1: chosen to open fire instead of opening the door, but
Speaker 1: nothing happened. For half an hour. They tried making contact
Speaker 1: with the brothers, but Dennis and Daniel didn't answer the phone.
Speaker 1: They were busy making phone calls of their own. Most
Speaker 1: of their friends failed to answer the phone so early
Speaker 1: in the morning, but Dennis left a voicemail for Becca Stevens,
Speaker 1: or at least the woman he thought was Becca Stephens.
Speaker 1: He would soon find out that his friend Becca was
Speaker 1: an ATF informant whose real name was Rebecca Williams, and
Speaker 1: he would later claim that he'd long suspected that she
Speaker 1: wasn't who she said she was. But at dawn on
Speaker 1: the day of his arrest, he called a woman he'd
Speaker 1: been in love with for years and told her he
Speaker 1: was considering going down shooting, but he didn't. At six
Speaker 1: forty five a m A deputy tried Dennis's cell phone again,
Speaker 1: this time from a number he wouldn't recognize. He picked
Speaker 1: up and agreed to surrender. Officers entered the house and
Speaker 1: arrested both brothers. They were just sitting calmly feet away
Speaker 1: from a loaded AK forty seven lying on the table.
Speaker 1: For the next two hours, the brothers sat in a
Speaker 1: van on their parents' front yard as ATF agent searched
Speaker 1: the house. They didn't know it yet, but ATF agents
Speaker 1: were searching the homes of their longtime friends Tom Metzker
Speaker 1: in Indiana and Robert Joes in Missouri. Sitting side by side,
Speaker 1: hands cuffed in their laps in a minivan, the twins
Speaker 1: discussed their situation. Dennis seemed to regret his choice, saying
Speaker 1: they should have had a shootout. Daniel seemed less ready
Speaker 1: to die, asking his brother what good it would have
Speaker 1: done to take out those agents. They were offered snacks
Speaker 1: and drinks, and the air conditioning was on. They took
Speaker 1: a few bathroom breaks, but mostly they sat and talked
Speaker 1: to each other as the agent searched the house. They
Speaker 1: speculated about what the agents might find him there, illegal
Speaker 1: armor piercing rounds, ornography, white supremacist literature, guns, and bomb
Speaker 1: making supplies. They worried about their mother, over whom they
Speaker 1: had recently been appointed legal guardians due to her advancing
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's disease, and they agreed that they'd stay silent. When
Speaker 1: Denis climbed out of the van to stretch his legs,
Speaker 1: around nine thirty, there was a man in a suit
Speaker 1: standing in his parents' front yard. He looked the man
Speaker 1: up and down and said, you know, I think I've
Speaker 1: seen you before, and atf Agent Tristan Morland, the man
Speaker 1: Dennis had known up until that moment as a neo
Speaker 1: Nazi named Jimmy the Wolf, answered, yes you have. I'm
Speaker 1: Molly Conger. And this is weird little guys. This is
Speaker 1: the last chapter of Dennis Mayhon's life. It has to be.
Speaker 1: It ends with a seventy four year old man who
Speaker 1: isn't scheduled to get out of federal prison until he's
Speaker 1: ninety three. He will almost certainly die there. And I
Speaker 1: really didn't intend for this to become a five part series.
Speaker 1: That's too many parts. Even with the cuts and compromises
Speaker 1: I've made, there's still so much left to say about
Speaker 1: the life this man led. But we can't let this
Speaker 1: become the Dennis Mayhon Show. There are too many weird
Speaker 1: little guys whose stories I've promised to tell you for
Speaker 1: us to spend any more weeks on Dennis. But one
Speaker 1: thing we keep discovering together on this show is that
Speaker 1: no Weird Little Guy is an island. Their lives intersect
Speaker 1: and intertwine and overlap. They share hate group affiliations, They
Speaker 1: date the same women, their suspects, and the same crimes.
Speaker 1: They attend the same cross burnings, and subscribe to each
Speaker 1: other's racist newsletters. I found a photo this week of
Speaker 1: Dennis Mayhon's White Berets at a clan rally in Tennessee
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three, where the headline speaker was Past
Speaker 1: Weird Little Guy's subject Berry Black. The influence their hate
Speaker 1: and violence has on the world can be devastating, but
Speaker 1: their worlds are actually pretty small, and through the lens
Speaker 1: of Dennis's life, we've traveled through several decades of hate,
Speaker 1: meeting side characters like the Tulsa Midtown boot Boys, a
Speaker 1: neo Nazi skinhead band in Oklahoma that was linked to
Speaker 1: years of racist violence. We followed Dennis to Germany, where
Speaker 1: he stoked the flames of anti immigrant violence amidst a
Speaker 1: resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. We met Carol Howe,
Speaker 1: the first ATF informant that Dennis fell in love with,
Speaker 1: and we followed Carol and Dennis to Alohem City, a
Speaker 1: white separatist compound with blurry connections to bombings and bank robberies.
Speaker 1: A lot of the bit players in Dennis's story will
Speaker 1: be back because they have whole stories of their own, too,
Speaker 1: like Daniel Rush, the bassist from the Midtown boot Boys,
Speaker 1: a few years after we left him in the early nineties,
Speaker 1: after his stint in prison for racially motivated violence, Strated
Speaker 1: a Nazi comic book that William Luther Pierce wrote for children.
Speaker 1: Or Wolfganroga, the German born neo Nazi Dennis was trying
Speaker 1: to visit in Canada when he got deported in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. A few years before he invited Dennis to Toronto,
Speaker 1: he was a key player in a hair brained scheme
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government of Dominika. That plan failed, but
Speaker 1: in a roundabout way, it's why the Nazi message board
Speaker 1: Stormfront exists. The website's founder, Don Black, learned how to
Speaker 1: use a computer during his prison sentence for attempting to
Speaker 1: coo the government of a Caribbean nation. So I think
Speaker 1: maybe you can understand why I've had so much trouble
Speaker 1: getting myself out of this rabbit hole. Admittedly, I often
Speaker 1: find that I am completely at the mercy of my curiosity.
Speaker 1: I have a list of episode topics ten pages long,
Speaker 1: and Dennis wasn't even on it. Back in November, I
Speaker 1: was reading a book written by Kelvin Pierce, the son
Speaker 1: of National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce. I was just
Speaker 1: trying to squeeze in a little research where I could
Speaker 1: for whenever the day comes that I try to tackle
Speaker 1: that story. And I got fixated on the question of money.
Speaker 1: If you can even remember back nearly two months ago. Now,
Speaker 1: this all started with a question of money. William Luther
Speaker 1: Pierce almost certainly paid for his West Virginia compound with
Speaker 1: stolen cash given to him in nineteen eighty four by
Speaker 1: Robert Matthews. But then I wanted to know what happened
Speaker 1: to the other four million dollars those Nazis stole out
Speaker 1: of the back of a brinkstruck. From there we got
Speaker 1: to the three hundred thousand dollars that ended up in
Speaker 1: the hands of Tom Metzger, the founder of White Arian Resistance.
Speaker 1: Have you ever read the children's book If You Give
Speaker 1: a Moose a muffin? I think there's one about a
Speaker 1: mouse and a cookie too. But when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I was a moose and muffin girl. Basically, the moose
Speaker 1: asks for a muffin, but once he gets the muffin,
Speaker 1: he realizes he needs jam to go with it, and
Speaker 1: it's so delicious that when he's done, he wants to
Speaker 1: go to the store to get more muffin ingredients, but
Speaker 1: it's cold outside, so he needs to put on a
Speaker 1: sweater to go to the store. But when he puts
Speaker 1: on the sweater, he loses the button and he wants
Speaker 1: to mend it, and before you know it, that one
Speaker 1: little muffin has turned into an afternoon long ordeal that
Speaker 1: has nothing at all to do with muffins. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of where I am right now, except there's no
Speaker 1: BlackBerry jam and there's a lot more hate crimes. Because
Speaker 1: while I was digging around into what Tom Metzker's immediate
Speaker 1: next move was after getting that mountain of cash, it
Speaker 1: was his nineteen eighties public access TV show, And that's
Speaker 1: where I first found Dennis. When we first encountered him,
Speaker 1: he was a side character in someone else's story. He
Speaker 1: was just one of many men around the country who
Speaker 1: were trying to air copies of Tom Metzger's show on
Speaker 1: their own local TV channels. I made a passing reference
Speaker 1: to his story ending with a bomb and a prison sentence,
Speaker 1: but I didn't realize i'd find all of this in between.
Speaker 1: I figured it would be a quick one and done
Speaker 1: follow up on the story of that bomb. It was
Speaker 1: a pretty well publicized case, and maybe I wouldn't even
Speaker 1: have to read any books or spend a lot of
Speaker 1: money on court documents to get a good story out
Speaker 1: of it. I have never been more wrong in my life.
Speaker 1: So after nearly two months on this story, let's finally
Speaker 1: get to the only bomb anybody ever proved Dennis Mayhon made.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and four, a package bomb exploded in
Speaker 1: the hands of Don Logan, director of Scottsdale, Arizona's Office
Speaker 1: of Diversity and Dialogue. He and two other city employees
Speaker 1: were injured. The Mayhon brothers were arrested in two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine and went to trial in twenty twelve. The
Speaker 1: jury found Dennis guilty, but acquitted his twin brother, Daniel.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you the ending here at the beginning, because
Speaker 1: this isn't an episode of Law and Order as easy
Speaker 1: as it would be to tell you a straightforward story
Speaker 1: of a trial, which is what I set out to
Speaker 1: do two months ago. I drove myself to the brink
Speaker 1: of madness instead, because those facts alone, that timeline raises
Speaker 1: a really big question. What took so long? You might think.
Speaker 1: The answer is, will investigations take time? Maybe they didn't
Speaker 1: know it was him, but they did almost immediately a
Speaker 1: few months before the bombing, Dennis Mayhon was unhappy to
Speaker 1: see that the city of Scottsdale was celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month,
Speaker 1: so he called the Office of Diversity and Dialog to
Speaker 1: share his feelings with them. He called from his own phone,
Speaker 1: and he introduced himself as Denis Mayhon of the White
Speaker 1: Arian Resistance of Arizona. He left a rambling, racial slur
Speaker 1: laden voicemail that ended kind of ominously quote, anyway, we've
Speaker 1: got lots of support. The White Arian resistance is growing
Speaker 1: in Scottsdale. There are a few white people who are
Speaker 1: standing up. So Dennis Mayhon was on investigator's radar pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: and his name was already very familiar to agents from
Speaker 1: the ATF. They'd had their eye on Dennis for nearly
Speaker 1: twenty years, but it still took another year before they
Speaker 1: began their undercover investigation into the Mayhun brothers. So at
Speaker 1: this point you might be thinking, Okay, they've got their suspect,
Speaker 1: they've got an undercover operation, but they're going to want
Speaker 1: to get him dead to rights. And maybe it took
Speaker 1: a long time for the informant to get him to
Speaker 1: confess on tape another reasonable assumption, but you'd be wrong again.
Speaker 1: In January of two thousand and five, nearly a year
Speaker 1: after the bombing, the Mayhun brothers were living in a
Speaker 1: trailer park in Catoosa, Oklahoma. The ATF arranged for their informant,
Speaker 1: Rebecca Williams, to move in a few trailers down and
Speaker 1: try to befriend them. Within hours of this beautiful blonde
Speaker 1: new neighbor's arrival on a Wednesday afternoon, the brothers were
Speaker 1: drinking in her trailer with ATF agents listening in. In
Speaker 1: their very first meeting, Dennis boasted about his long history
Speaker 1: of bombings. Mid drinks, he ran back to his own
Speaker 1: trainlor to get his photo album because he was eager
Speaker 1: to show his new friend Rebecca pictures of him in
Speaker 1: his clan robes. By the time the weekend rolled around.
Speaker 1: They were all drunk on Ever Clear, and the brothers
Speaker 1: were regaling her with stories of bombings and drive by shootings. Daniel,
Speaker 1: the quieter brother, explained that when he blew up people's cars,
Speaker 1: it wasn't out of anger, it was a sense of duty.
Speaker 1: Barely a week into their budding friendship, Rebecca told Dennis
Speaker 1: a made up story about a child molester. She said
Speaker 1: there was a man she knew who was molesting a
Speaker 1: young relative of hers, and she wanted to hurt him.
Speaker 1: She was thinking of using a mail bomb. Dennis responded
Speaker 1: by describing what kind of bomb a person might make
Speaker 1: in such a scenario, and the bomb he described was
Speaker 1: identical to the one that had blown up in Scottsdale.
Speaker 1: In a conversation that took place inside her train, Tayler
Speaker 1: captured on audio and video recording live streamed to agents
Speaker 1: from the ATF, he said that he had successfully made
Speaker 1: such a bomb and that it blew the fingers off
Speaker 1: the diversity officer in Scottsdale, Arizona. Now he's probably drunk.
Speaker 1: He usually is, and he says things he shouldn't say
Speaker 1: when he's drunk, and he backtracks pretty quickly, saying, actually,
Speaker 1: he didn't build that bomb. It was the Scottsdale Police
Speaker 1: Department who did that, but he'd taught them how to
Speaker 1: do it. He would maintain for years that it was
Speaker 1: in fact, disgruntled white police officers in Scottsdale who built
Speaker 1: the bomb. The ATF did investigate those leads. Several employees
Speaker 1: of the Scottsdale Police Department where polygraphed, their phones were tapped.
Speaker 1: They were investigated and cleared, But that was the story
Speaker 1: Dennis stuck with for a long time. But still here
Speaker 1: he is on tape, just days into this undercover operation,
Speaker 1: linking himself to that bomb. Within weeks, Dennis was taking
Speaker 1: Rebecca to the gun show to buy the parts he'd
Speaker 1: need to teach her how to build a bomb. Over
Speaker 1: and over and over again for years, Dennis Mahon makes
Speaker 1: incriminating statements on tape to a federal informant. He admits
Speaker 1: to having machine guns and illegal silencers. He teaches her
Speaker 1: how to make a letter bomb that will only injure
Speaker 1: and not kill its recipient. They discuss the Scottsdale bomb often.
Speaker 1: After she moves to Arizona, he asks her to mail
Speaker 1: him news clippings about the ongoing investigation. A year into
Speaker 1: their friendship, she sent him a news story where Don Logan,
Speaker 1: the victim of that bombing, was interviewed. Afterwards, he called
Speaker 1: her to talk about it, and he's clearly in a
Speaker 1: rage to see that his victim is still carrying on
Speaker 1: the work of the diversity office. He called Logan a
Speaker 1: quote very arrogant bastard who just might get what's coming
Speaker 1: to him again. And he said, quote, I just wanted
Speaker 1: to teach the motherfucker a lesson the first time, and
Speaker 1: there will be no lesson to learn a second time.
Speaker 1: And it was still another three years after that phone
Speaker 1: call before cops showed up on his front porch. What
Speaker 1: could they possibly have been waiting for. They had enough
Speaker 1: evidence to arrest him on a wide variety of federal charges,
Speaker 1: and they clearly planned to because they kept pouring resources
Speaker 1: into the investigation, but they waited four years. I think
Speaker 1: the answer, though, is pretty simple. They had enough evidence
Speaker 1: to arrest Dennis, but they didn't just want Dennis. In
Speaker 1: last week's story, we flirted a little bit with conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: Carol Howe provided information to the ATF in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: four that Dennis mayhon was talking about blowing up a
Speaker 1: federal building. A few months later, someone else actually did
Speaker 1: blow up that federal building, but there was never anything
Speaker 1: substantial that actually connected Dennis to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of unanswered questions, some of which
Speaker 1: are aggravated by Dennis's own habit of getting drunk and
Speaker 1: bragging about having been involved. But as far as the
Speaker 1: official record goes, the only connection between Dennis Mayhon and
Speaker 1: Timothy mcveay is that they possibly once met at a
Speaker 1: gun show. This week, though we aren't talking about a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory, we're talking about conspiracy in the legal sense.
Speaker 1: In twenty twelve, a federal jury found Dennis Mayhon guilty
Speaker 1: of three things, distribution of information about explosives, malicious damage
Speaker 1: of a building by means of explosives, and conspiracy to
Speaker 1: damage buildings in property by means of explosives. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of words to say he talked about making a bomb,
Speaker 1: planned to build a bomb, and set off a bomb.
Speaker 1: But the conspiracy charge is what I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: A criminal conspiracy is just an agreement between two or
Speaker 1: more people to do something illegal. The conspirators discuss an
Speaker 1: illegal act, they intend to commit this illegal act, and
Speaker 1: at least one of them takes some kind of step
Speaker 1: to carry the plan out. It's a little bit more
Speaker 1: complicated than that, but this isn't a criminal law class,
Speaker 1: so let's not get bogged down. The thing to understand
Speaker 1: here is that a conspiracy requires more than one person.
Speaker 1: In this case, the government did indict Dennis's twin brother Daniel,
Speaker 1: on a single count of conspiracy, but the jury found
Speaker 1: him not guilty. Two people is enough for a conspiracy,
Speaker 1: and these were the only two people who got charged
Speaker 1: in this one. But the ATF's theory of the case
Speaker 1: involved a much wider cast of characters, people all over
Speaker 1: the country. Halfway through this investigation, Agent Morland filed an
Speaker 1: application for a wire tap. In it, he reveals who
Speaker 1: he thinks might be involved. An heir to a banking
Speaker 1: fortune who is locked in a legal battle over his
Speaker 1: family's charitable foundation. A pair of Nazi brothers who did
Speaker 1: time in the eighties for a fouridi plot to blow
Speaker 1: up an elementary school in Ohio. A Christian identity preacher
Speaker 1: hiding machine guns and precious metals in caves on his
Speaker 1: compound in the Ozarks, an infamous white nationalist leader and
Speaker 1: a wealthy farmer from Illinois who once got us teeth
Speaker 1: knocked out by Heraldo Rivera at a clan rally. We
Speaker 1: should start with the bomb. At the end of last
Speaker 1: week's episode, Dennis was at Arionfest and Phoenix, Arizona. It
Speaker 1: was the end of January two thousand and four. Dennis
Speaker 1: was fifty three years old and claimed to be retired
Speaker 1: from the movement. He spent the weekend listening to white
Speaker 1: power bands and speeches from movement leaders like his friend
Speaker 1: Tom Metzger, Arian Nation's leader, Richard Butler, and Billy Roper,
Speaker 1: and he got really, really drunk. A reporter from the
Speaker 1: Phoenix New Times overheard him bragging to some young neo
Speaker 1: Nazis about having been involved with Timothy McVeigh. When the
Speaker 1: article came out a few weeks later, Dennis left the
Speaker 1: reporter several very trunk voicemails trying to explain to her
Speaker 1: that he had actually been cleared in the investigation into
Speaker 1: the Oklahoma City bombing, and he wanted her to make
Speaker 1: that clear in the article. Tom Metzker, whose speech at
Speaker 1: arian Fest included what you might interpret as incitement to
Speaker 1: carry out bombings, also responded to the article, emailing the
Speaker 1: reporter quote amusing article. If only you knew, but you will.
Speaker 1: Years later, a man named Alan was arrested for defrauding
Speaker 1: buyers on eBay. Alan Ellen wasn't at Arianfest. He's not
Speaker 1: involved in any of this. I think he's just a
Speaker 1: normal guy who did a pretty staggering amount of wire fraud.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and nine he was being held
Speaker 1: at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. Dennis Mahon was
Speaker 1: there too. He'd just been arrested and he was awaiting
Speaker 1: extradition to Arizona to be tried for the bombing, and
Speaker 1: for a week in July two thousand and nine, Dennis
Speaker 1: and Allen shared a sell. During their time together, Alan
Speaker 1: asked Dennis what he was in for, and Dennis refused
Speaker 1: to say. This prompted Alan to speculate that if you
Speaker 1: won't say, it must be pedophilia, and that apparently made
Speaker 1: Dennis angry enough to tell the truth. He said he
Speaker 1: was in for making bombs, specifically that he was the
Speaker 1: Scottsdale bomber. I think it's fair to say that you
Speaker 1: always have to take the story of a jailhouse informant
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt. Allan was definitely hoping to
Speaker 1: exchange this information for some consideration in his own case,
Speaker 1: and ultimately he did. But from the time he claims
Speaker 1: he had these conversations with Dennis, until he was interviewed
Speaker 1: by federal agents about it, he was in seg He
Speaker 1: wasn't involved in the movement, He had no connection to Scottsdale, Arizona.
Speaker 1: I can't promise you that everything he said is true,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's very safe to say that
Speaker 1: everything he told those agents really was something Dennis told him,
Speaker 1: because there's just no other way he could have produced
Speaker 1: any of these details. Some of the things Dennis told
Speaker 1: Alan are not true, but they are consistent with the
Speaker 1: kinds of lies Dennis is known to tell. He boasted
Speaker 1: about his friendship with Timothy McVeigh and even hinted that
Speaker 1: he had been one of the John Does that witnesses
Speaker 1: saw with McVeigh on the morning of the bombing. He
Speaker 1: claimed to have opened fire on civilians during the Miami
Speaker 1: riots in nineteen eighty and we've talked about both of
Speaker 1: those claims in previous episodes. These are lies that have
Speaker 1: come up before, and I don't think either of those
Speaker 1: things are true, but there are things that Dennis sometimes
Speaker 1: wants you to think are true. He also told Alan
Speaker 1: that he'd been on the phone with Tom Metzger on
Speaker 1: the morning he was arrested, and that it had been
Speaker 1: Tom Metzger who convinced him to surrender, telling him he
Speaker 1: didn't need to go down shooting, that he'd get him
Speaker 1: out of this, and that may be true. Metzger certainly
Speaker 1: would not have wanted to end up charged in connection
Speaker 1: with the deaths of a bunch of federal agents. The
Speaker 1: other revelations from Alan are intriguing. By his account, Dennis
Speaker 1: decided to build that bomb in February of two thousand
Speaker 1: and four because he'd recently met a man that he
Speaker 1: wanted to impress. Alan couldn't remember anyone's names, but he
Speaker 1: says shortly before the bombing, Dennis met a man from
Speaker 1: Europe who had recently been released from a prison in
Speaker 1: the UK for blowing up a building. It struck me
Speaker 1: as completely extraneous at first, but this next detail is
Speaker 1: the most important one. He mentions that the man was Protestant.
Speaker 1: This is all very vague. This sounds like it could
Speaker 1: be nothing, but hear me out because I'm going to
Speaker 1: do a little wild speculation based in half a day
Speaker 1: of wasted research. Let's go back to arian Fest two
Speaker 1: thousand and four for a second. It takes a lot
Speaker 1: of work to pull off a Nazi picnic, so there
Speaker 1: were several groups involved in planning the event. It was
Speaker 1: organized mainly by a group called Folksfront, but that's not
Speaker 1: important right now. A lot of the on the ground logistics, camping, food,
Speaker 1: communication were handled by women. Obviously, specifically, it was a
Speaker 1: group called Women for Aaryan Unity. The group's newsletter indicates
Speaker 1: that they had active chapters in several US cities and
Speaker 1: in Dublin. But I didn't need their newsletter to tell
Speaker 1: me that the Women for Aaryan Unity probably know some
Speaker 1: Ulster loyalists. Victoria Cayhill was living in Colorado by the
Speaker 1: time she was responsible for the Women for Arian Unity's newsletter,
Speaker 1: but she is from Dublin. She's also the niece of
Speaker 1: an infamous Irish crime boss named Martin Kyhill. When Martin
Speaker 1: kay Hill was murdered in nineteen ninety four, the IRA
Speaker 1: issued a press release claiming responsibility. Was believed that Khill's
Speaker 1: criminal organization had been trafficking guns for the Ulster Volunteer Force,
Speaker 1: specifically for the the unit that had recently murdered an
Speaker 1: IRA member who prevented a loyalist bombing attack at a
Speaker 1: Dublin pub. So no, it's not hard to believe somewhat
Speaker 1: an ary infest would invite an ulsterman to the party.
Speaker 1: In the few digital scraps remaining of the defunct online
Speaker 1: message boards set up for Aryan Fest two thousand and four, attendees,
Speaker 1: several organizers from Women for Aryan Unity make reference to
Speaker 1: their Irish guests, but I haven't been able to put
Speaker 1: any names to it. There are honestly quite a few
Speaker 1: possibilities here because after the Good Friday Agreement was signed
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight, over four hundred prisoners from both
Speaker 1: sides of the troubles were released early from prison, and
Speaker 1: the last batch of those releases took place in two
Speaker 1: thousand and Alan told the agents from the ATF that
Speaker 1: Dennis built that bomb because he wanted to impress a
Speaker 1: Protestant from the UK who went to prison from blowing
Speaker 1: up a building, and that will be a very strange
Speaker 1: thing for a man who didn't know any of that
Speaker 1: to pull out of thin air. He also claimed Dennis
Speaker 1: told him after the bombing, Tom Metzger had arranged for
Speaker 1: the brothers to stay with a man named Harrington in Tulsa.
Speaker 1: This one took me a minute to sort out, because
Speaker 1: the ATF report spells Harrington with an A, not an E.
Speaker 1: But I believe this has to be Clifford Harrington, the
Speaker 1: founder and former chairman of the National Socialist Movement. He
Speaker 1: had stepped down as chairman a few years earlier and
Speaker 1: was living in Tulsa at the time. Alan's memory is
Speaker 1: fuzzy here, but he said something about how maybe this
Speaker 1: Harrington fellow also needed Dennis's help because of his own
Speaker 1: trouble with the law, And that doesn't make much sense.
Speaker 1: How can two men hide each other from the law.
Speaker 1: But I think I can explain this. I think Al
Speaker 1: is blending together two different similar stories because there are
Speaker 1: rumors in the weirder corners of the white nationalist world
Speaker 1: that cliff Harrington crashed at Denis's house for a while
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties after he got caught with an
Speaker 1: underage girl in Minnesota. So maybe Harrington was just repaying
Speaker 1: the favor ten years later by letting Dennis stay at
Speaker 1: his house after the bombing. Harrington's wife, Andrea, has denied
Speaker 1: any of this ever happened, but she was also a
Speaker 1: priestess with the Nazi cult Joy of Satan Ministries, and
Speaker 1: she spent many years denying a lot of allegations after
Speaker 1: it came out that the Nazi's wife was running a
Speaker 1: Satanic cult out of the same po box he used
Speaker 1: for National Socialist Movement business. She died in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: after falling and hitting her head, so we can't ask
Speaker 1: her about any of that. During that week in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine that Dennis and Allan share a sell,
Speaker 1: Dennis talked a lot. He talked a lot about a
Speaker 1: lot of people he knew and a lot of things
Speaker 1: that he'd done. He talked about his friend Steve Waddell,
Speaker 1: a man who'd lived down the street from the Mayhon
Speaker 1: Brothers in Tulsa in the nineties, and he told Alan
Speaker 1: that he's worried his friend John McLaughlin might be a
Speaker 1: federal informant. Talked a lot about Tom Metzger. He was
Speaker 1: so sure that Metzger was already hard at work organizing
Speaker 1: a big, expensive legal defense team for him. After all,
Speaker 1: he'd promised on the morning of the arrest, We'll get
Speaker 1: you out of this. But that never happened. Like I said,
Speaker 1: Maybe nothing Dennis told Allan in that jail cell in Chicago,
Speaker 1: five years after the bombing means anything at all, but
Speaker 1: whether he felt moved to impress an aging monarchist from
Speaker 1: Ireland or not. It was just two weeks after airing
Speaker 1: Infest two thousand and four that he really recommitted himself
Speaker 1: to violence. On February thirteenth, two thousand and four, Dennis
Speaker 1: Mahon wrote out his last will and testament. He planned
Speaker 1: to leave five thousand dollars to Tom Metzger and everything
Speaker 1: else would go to his twin brother Daniel. The document
Speaker 1: was signed by Daniel as his witness, and it reads,
Speaker 1: in part, I request to be buried next to Robert J.
Speaker 1: Matthews ashes on his widow Matthew's property in Medeline Falls, Washington.
Speaker 1: I have fought the evil, greedy race and culture destroying politicians,
Speaker 1: the corporate leaders, the bankers, and the powerful Jews since
Speaker 1: I was twenty eight years old, after studying the real
Speaker 1: history of our race. At the bottom, he signs off
Speaker 1: by writing in memory of Robert Matthews, and Tim mcphay
Speaker 1: just above his own signature. He sent the document to
Speaker 1: his fow in Illinois by certified mail. Postal Service records
Speaker 1: indicate he mailed it on February twenty first, the same
Speaker 1: day the bomb was discovered. Now, I've never built a bomb, obviously,
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to change a car battery.
Speaker 1: I certainly wouldn't trust myself with a soldering iron and
Speaker 1: black powder. But I've read enough about bombers to know
Speaker 1: that it's not uncommon for a bomber to blow himself
Speaker 1: up by accident. So maybe if I were tinkering with
Speaker 1: a bomb, I would get my will sorted out beforehand,
Speaker 1: just in case. But that's not actually the timeline we
Speaker 1: have here. He wasn't concerned he would die trying to
Speaker 1: make the bomb. He assumed the cops would link him
Speaker 1: to the bomb immediately after the explosion, and he was
Speaker 1: getting his affairs in order because he planned to die
Speaker 1: in a shootout with the ATF in the very near future.
Speaker 1: He even asked to be laid to rest alongside Robert Matthews,
Speaker 1: the Nazi who died in a shootout with the FBI
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. On February twenty First, he mails
Speaker 1: his will, and he made a lot of phone calls.
Speaker 1: No one can save for certain exactly how the bomb
Speaker 1: ended up in the Scottsdale Public Library, but the most
Speaker 1: logical answer is that Dennis put it there himself. He'd
Speaker 1: said several times over the years to both informants and
Speaker 1: reporters that it was his practice to hand deliver his
Speaker 1: package bombs in disguise. The package was located at about
Speaker 1: ten thirty am, and Dennis's phone records show that he
Speaker 1: was on the phone most of that day, starting at
Speaker 1: six am, but he didn't make any calls between nine
Speaker 1: thirty am and eleven thirty am, which is the perfect
Speaker 1: window of time for him to make the thirty minute
Speaker 1: round trip drive to Scottsdale's Civic Center and leave the
Speaker 1: package on the desk in the library where it was found.
Speaker 1: And who did Dennis Mayhon call on the morning he
Speaker 1: planted that bomb? Quite a few people, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: the day the bomb was planted, Dennis Mayhon got up early.
Speaker 1: He placed his first call of the day at six
Speaker 1: am to Robert Joe's. Joe's is a curious character, and
Speaker 1: we may have to revisit him. He still lives on
Speaker 1: his three hundred acre compound in Missouri. Over the course
Speaker 1: of the investigation into the bombing, Dennis told the ATF
Speaker 1: informant Rebecca a lot about his friend Robert Jo's. They'd
Speaker 1: known each other for quite a long time. When Joe's
Speaker 1: went to prison in the mid nineties, the Mayhon Brothers
Speaker 1: maintained his property for him. He's a bit of a
Speaker 1: sovereign citizen type. In the late eighties, he was charged
Speaker 1: with interfering with the courts because he wouldn't stop filing
Speaker 1: nonsense motions in cases he wasn't involved in, but the
Speaker 1: cops couldn't manage to get their hands on him. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, he was finally detained by a state
Speaker 1: trooper during a traffic stop and held on that old warrant.
Speaker 1: Shortly after his arrest, a man who'd been living on
Speaker 1: Jose's compound took revenge on that trooper, shooting him in
Speaker 1: the chest while he was sitting at his own kitchen table.
Speaker 1: The trooper survived, but the shooter, a man named Timothy Coombs,
Speaker 1: remains on Missouri's Most wantedless to this day as a
Speaker 1: convicted felon. Robert jos is not supposed to have any
Speaker 1: guns at all, but according to Dennis, the caves the
Speaker 1: landscape of his compound are full of stockpiled weapons. Those caves,
Speaker 1: he told Rebecca, were where he and his brother would
Speaker 1: go if they really started to feel any heat from
Speaker 1: the FEDS. During the investigation into the Scottsdale bombing, the
Speaker 1: informant visited Joe's on his Missouri compound three times, twice
Speaker 1: in the company of an undercover agent, with the Mayhun
Speaker 1: brothers vouching for Rebecca and Rebecca vouching for her friend
Speaker 1: Jimmy the Wolf. Jo's welcomed the informant and the agent
Speaker 1: onto his property. They discussed bomb making and purchasing illegal weapons.
Speaker 1: Over the course of those three visits, Joe's got very
Speaker 1: comfortable discussing bomb making and illegal guns with his new friends.
Speaker 1: Agent Morland, posing as Jimmy the Wolf, had a fairly
Speaker 1: explicit conversation with Jo's about the fact that he understood
Speaker 1: that he was not legally allowed to own any guns,
Speaker 1: and that he did in fact own guns guns that
Speaker 1: were in the room with them as they had this conversation.
Speaker 1: While the ATF was never able to scrape together enough
Speaker 1: proof to charge Joe's as a co conspirator in the bombing.
Speaker 1: He was arrested the same day as the Mayhon twins
Speaker 1: and charged with being a felon in possession of guns
Speaker 1: and explosives, both of which were found in abundance on
Speaker 1: his property. In his own criminal case, he tried to
Speaker 1: downplay his connection to the Mayhans, claiming that he had
Speaker 1: no real knowledge at all of what the brothers were into.
Speaker 1: Admitted into evidence in his case, though, was a videotape
Speaker 1: the ATF found at Tom Metzger's house. In nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: Dennis Mayhon conducted paramilitary training drills for members of White
Speaker 1: Airyan Resistance on Jose's property. By the time the twins
Speaker 1: went to trial in twenty twelve, jos was already two
Speaker 1: years into his seven year sentence. I'm not sure what
Speaker 1: I thought I would learn by paying thirty dollars to
Speaker 1: read the transcripts from his trial. I didn't get much
Speaker 1: of substance out of it, but I couldn't live with
Speaker 1: myself if I didn't tell you that He tried to
Speaker 1: attend his own trial in his underwear. He claimed that
Speaker 1: his religious beliefs require him to wear clothing that complies
Speaker 1: only with God's Law, which means that he can only
Speaker 1: wear clothing that has fringed down the sides and a
Speaker 1: violet ribbon around the border. Now me personally, I'd rather
Speaker 1: show up in court in my underwear than unpack the
Speaker 1: strange appropriation of misinterpreted Jewish law by the world's weirdest
Speaker 1: anti semites. In the end, the jail wouldn't let him
Speaker 1: go to court in his underpants, so he showed up
Speaker 1: to the first day of his trial in his jail uniform. Apparently,
Speaker 1: by the second day someone had provided him with satisfactorily
Speaker 1: fringed garments, but there aren't any pictures. He was released
Speaker 1: from prison in twenty fifteen and seems to have stayed
Speaker 1: out of any criminal trouble since then, But it looks
Speaker 1: like he's being sued by his ninety four year old
Speaker 1: mother over the title to that land. Robert Joe's wasn't
Speaker 1: called to testify in the Mayhans trial, and I don't
Speaker 1: know if he's had a chance to read any of
Speaker 1: those documents since he got out of prison in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: He may have no idea that before his arrest in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, Dennis had started to talk pretty
Speaker 1: seriously about putting a bullet in Robert Joe's and taking
Speaker 1: the thirty thousand dollars worth of the silver he believed
Speaker 1: was hidden in the caves. Back to the morning the
Speaker 1: bomb was planted in two thousand and four, After he
Speaker 1: got off the phone with Joe's, Dennis spoke briefly with
Speaker 1: his brother, who was finishing an overnight shift at the
Speaker 1: Phoenix Airport, and then he made his second phone call
Speaker 1: of the morning, and he called Charles Koontz. Kontz is
Speaker 1: an interesting element in this story because outside of this relationship,
Speaker 1: I can't find anything that connects him to the white
Speaker 1: power movement. No arrests, no group affiliations, no racist letters
Speaker 1: to the editor of his local paper. Aside from the
Speaker 1: filings in this case, the only other places name really
Speaker 1: exists is in the extensive litigation regarding his seat on
Speaker 1: the board of the Gilbert and Martha Hitchcock Foundation, a
Speaker 1: charitable foundation in Nebraska that was run for decades by
Speaker 1: his father, Denman Kones Junior, the great grandson of the
Speaker 1: founder of the first National Bank of Omaha. But it
Speaker 1: seems Charles Kuntz had been a quiet but enthusiastic supporter
Speaker 1: of white supremacist terror for many years. He sent the
Speaker 1: Mayhon brothers money, he visited them occasionally, he called often,
Speaker 1: and he once gave them a car. By the time
Speaker 1: Dennis's conversations were being recorded by a federal informant, though
Speaker 1: they had been enjoying for years, seemed to be drying
Speaker 1: up a little. After his father's death in two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, Kons lost his seat on the board of
Speaker 1: the Hitchcock Foundation. Factions formed within the family, and they
Speaker 1: all spent years suing each other, which probably took up
Speaker 1: a lot of his time and money. Over the years
Speaker 1: between two thousand and five and two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: Dennis would often tell Rebecca that he was concerned Kons
Speaker 1: maybe an informant, which is a little funny because we
Speaker 1: only know he said that because he was sharing those
Speaker 1: fears with the actual informant. After Coon's visited Dennis one
Speaker 1: day in two thousand and five, he called Rebecca to
Speaker 1: complain that Coons wouldn't stop asking if they could shoot
Speaker 1: some of Dennis's guns together, and it was very suspicious
Speaker 1: how insistent he was that he wanted to try shooting
Speaker 1: with a silencer, something that would be a federal crime
Speaker 1: for Denis to own. Later that year, he told Rebecca
Speaker 1: that Koons had been asking him a lot of questions
Speaker 1: about various bombings he'd carried out in the past. He
Speaker 1: was trying to get specific details about which abortion clinic
Speaker 1: it was that he bombed in the eighties, and he
Speaker 1: really wanted to talk about Scottsdale. And honestly, that sounds
Speaker 1: like snitch behavior. That's exactly the kind of conversation an
Speaker 1: informant might try to have with you. But the ATF
Speaker 1: put his name in their wiretap affidavit as a suspect,
Speaker 1: so I don't think he was their informant. I guess
Speaker 1: we have to leave open the possibility that he was
Speaker 1: informing for another agency, or maybe he was just planning
Speaker 1: to do some freelance snitching down the line. More likely, though,
Speaker 1: I think he just liked living vicariously through the domestic
Speaker 1: terrorists he'd been funding for years. He sent them money,
Speaker 1: and in return, he got to feel like he was
Speaker 1: part of something exciting. By two thousand and seven, he
Speaker 1: was only sending the Brothers a few hundred dollars every
Speaker 1: couple of months, around the same time that he started
Speaker 1: talking about killing Robert Jo's and stealing his guns in Silver,
Speaker 1: Dennis was complaining to Rebecca that Koontz had millions in
Speaker 1: the bank and he was holding out on him. He
Speaker 1: said he was thinking about asking Kons for one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars so he could do something big, and if
Speaker 1: Konz refused, maybe he'd take him out to Jos's compound
Speaker 1: and quote cut his balls off with a dull knife.
Speaker 1: Kontz was never called to testify in the trial, and
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, he's never spoken publicly
Speaker 1: about any of this. I couldn't even find in the
Speaker 1: documentation for the case any transcripts of intercepted calls between
Speaker 1: Dennis and Coots. They may be there, there are thousands
Speaker 1: of documents, but I didn't see them. So most of
Speaker 1: what I know about their relationship comes from transcripts of
Speaker 1: calls where Dennis gets off the phone with Coons and
Speaker 1: then calls Rebecca and describes it to her. But based
Speaker 1: on the information I do have, it seems like in
Speaker 1: the months before Dennis was finally arrested, his long time
Speaker 1: benefactor really did have his best interests at heart, he
Speaker 1: was incredibly suspicious of Rebecca. For the most part, Dennis
Speaker 1: believed Rebecca when she said she'd moved out to Arizona
Speaker 1: and gotten involved in order militia type activity. The ATF
Speaker 1: staged a whole photo shoot out in the deserts with
Speaker 1: agents dressed up as right wing extremists posing with guns
Speaker 1: and Nazi flags. She mailed Dennis a photo from that outing.
Speaker 1: She's sort of leaning up against a blue pickup truck
Speaker 1: and the edge of a Nazi flag is visible behind her.
Speaker 1: She's wearing a cameo print bucket hat and a white
Speaker 1: bikini top, and then there nestled between her breasts, there's
Speaker 1: a hand grenade. And Dennis apparently really really enjoyed these pictures,
Speaker 1: and that may be why he chose to believe her,
Speaker 1: But Coons just wasn't buying it. Just two months before
Speaker 1: the ATF showed up to arrest Dennis, Coons called him
Speaker 1: to say that he'd been searching for any news stories
Speaker 1: in Arizona about the kinds of things Rebecca claimed she'd
Speaker 1: been doing for the movement right. She'd been telling Dennis
Speaker 1: about various actions she and her cell were carrying out
Speaker 1: and Konz was looking to see if there was any
Speaker 1: news about any of this, and he couldn't find anything.
Speaker 1: And Dennis was irate at this implication, and he told
Speaker 1: Kons that Rebecca had done more for the movement than
Speaker 1: Coon's ever had. And then he reminded Kons that Dennis
Speaker 1: was someone who knew what he was talking about, shouting,
Speaker 1: you don't know how many pipe bombs I lit off.
Speaker 1: You don't know how many transformers I've destroyed and put
Speaker 1: people out of in the early eighties, from eighty two
Speaker 1: to eighty seven before I got outed. And again here's
Speaker 1: Dennis making some oddly specific claims about things he'd done
Speaker 1: in the past. Last week, I tried and failed to
Speaker 1: find any news stories about a five hundred pound ammonium
Speaker 1: nitrate bomb blowing up a truck in Michigan in the eighties,
Speaker 1: which is a very specific claim that he made to
Speaker 1: Carol Howe. And here he is now talking about carrying
Speaker 1: out a grid attack in the eighties. I wish you'd
Speaker 1: be a little more specific about what region and maybe
Speaker 1: exactly which year, because I feel like I could solve
Speaker 1: this if he just gave me a few more clues.
Speaker 1: One possibility is in nineteen eighty one, three power substations
Speaker 1: in Martin and Saint Lucie Counties were attacked in the
Speaker 1: same night using a combination of rifle fire and explosives,
Speaker 1: the method that Dennis would later drunkenly describe to Rebecca.
Speaker 1: The attacks coused about a million dollars worth of damage,
Speaker 1: but the lights actually only went out for about an hour.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any follow up stories about the incident
Speaker 1: being solved, and Dennis did live in South Florida at
Speaker 1: the time, so I don't know. In another conversation with Rebecca,
Speaker 1: he's starting to get very paranoid that his past might
Speaker 1: catch up with him, and he's sure that the Feds
Speaker 1: are closing in quote for something that happened in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six nineteen eighty five. Quite a few things happened
Speaker 1: in those two years around the country. A lot of
Speaker 1: bombs went off.
Speaker 2: End.
Speaker 1: Quote Yeah, I don't know about that one. I mean
Speaker 1: some bombs definitely did go off in eighty five and
Speaker 1: eighty six. In nineteen eighty six, there was a series
Speaker 1: of bombings in Idaho carried out by members of the
Speaker 1: Arian Nations, but there were a rest made in those cases.
Speaker 1: Nineteen eighty six is also the year I found for
Speaker 1: an unsolved pipe bomb at a Jewish community center in
Speaker 1: West Bloomfield, Michigan, a bomb at a Detroit abortion clinic,
Speaker 1: and an arson at a Planned parenthood in Kalamazoo. I
Speaker 1: don't think any of those were ever solved, but again
Speaker 1: it's hard to say so. If you know a retired
Speaker 1: ATF agent with loose lips, for the love of God,
Speaker 1: asked them to just give me a hint, Just give
Speaker 1: me a hint, because I lost days trying to figure
Speaker 1: out every unsolved bombing in the span of fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and I just can't figure out which bombs Dennis is
Speaker 1: trying to take credit for in that angry phone call
Speaker 1: with his secret benefactor. But back to Dennis's phone calls
Speaker 1: on the morning he planted this bomb. So far, he's
Speaker 1: called Robert Joes, his brother, and Charles Kon's. He talks
Speaker 1: to his brother again briefly, and then he received a
Speaker 1: call from someone using a calling card with an Atlanta
Speaker 1: area code. The call lasted less than a minute. He
Speaker 1: may not have even picked up, but the same number
Speaker 1: called again two more times five days later, just a
Speaker 1: few hours after the bomb actually went off, and both
Speaker 1: of those calls also lasted just a few seconds. I
Speaker 1: can't explain that, and there's nothing offered in the record.
Speaker 1: He missed two more calls from his brother while he
Speaker 1: was on the phone for his longest call. That morning,
Speaker 1: he spent half an hour on the phone with Edward Gerhardt.
Speaker 1: And this was another surprise. I didn't expect to see
Speaker 1: them here. Edward and his brother John started a short
Speaker 1: lived Nazi group called the American White Nationalist Party in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy four, they were sentenced
Speaker 1: to a short stay at the State Reformatory for shooting
Speaker 1: out the windows of a state education official and then
Speaker 1: calling to let him know that it had only been
Speaker 1: a warning from the clan. A nineteen seventy six issue
Speaker 1: of the Ohio National Socialist includes a brief mention that
Speaker 1: Ohio leaders of the National Socialist Movement had met with
Speaker 1: ed and John Gerhardt of the American White Nationalist Party
Speaker 1: to discuss how their Nazi groups might present a unified
Speaker 1: front against forced busing in Columbus. One of the representatives
Speaker 1: at that meeting was a young James Mason. Just a
Speaker 1: few years before he would start writing the essays that
Speaker 1: would eventually become Siege every Nazi terrorist's favorite book. And
Speaker 1: as for that United Front against desegregation in Ohio, the
Speaker 1: Gerhardt brothers would spend a few years in federal prison
Speaker 1: after they were arrested in nineteen seventy nine for plotting
Speaker 1: to blow up Old Orchard Elementary School in Columbus. The
Speaker 1: eleven year old daughter of the federal judge who'd ordered
Speaker 1: Columbus schools to begin bussing was a student there. John
Speaker 1: Gerhardt would go on to get arrested again in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two for abduction. During the decade he spent in
Speaker 1: Ohio prison, he sued the state prison system for infringing
Speaker 1: on his free exercise of religion. The religion in question
Speaker 1: was the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which sounds like
Speaker 1: it might be normal Christianity, but it's not. It is
Speaker 1: the particular flavor of Christian identity that was popularized by
Speaker 1: Arian Nation's leader, Richard Butler. I can't find much about
Speaker 1: what Edward Gerhart got up to after he got out
Speaker 1: of prison in nineteen eighty three. He doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: exist anywhere that I could find, Although admittedly I ran
Speaker 1: out of time to look. But based on my cursor research,
Speaker 1: if I didn't know that he'd been on the phone
Speaker 1: with a bomber on the morning of a bombing in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, I might have assumed that he
Speaker 1: just didn't think about bombs at all anymore. But given
Speaker 1: that I do know that he was on the phone
Speaker 1: with Dennis the morning of the bombing, I gotta say
Speaker 1: I don't think they were talking about the weather. And
Speaker 1: just before Dennis Mayhon's phone goes quiet for that two
Speaker 1: hour window, which is probably when he dropped off the bomb,
Speaker 1: he made one last phone call. He called Tom Metzger,
Speaker 1: and they spoke for seven minutes. Dennis must have been
Speaker 1: very confused. Later that day, he didn't see anything in
Speaker 1: the news about a bomb. He planted that bomb on
Speaker 1: February twenty first. Then he went home and he waited.
Speaker 1: What he didn't know is that he'd delivered it to
Speaker 1: the wrong address. It's not entirely clear how this mistake happened,
Speaker 1: but he wrote down on the box the address of
Speaker 1: the library, not the address of the diversity office, and
Speaker 1: so when the time came to deliver it, he took
Speaker 1: the box to the address written on the box. It
Speaker 1: took another five days before that package found its way
Speaker 1: into Don Logan's hands, detonating around one pm on February
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, and when the explosion finally hit the national
Speaker 1: news that evening, Charles Koontz started blowing up Dennis's phone.
Speaker 1: He called him several times that evening, right around the
Speaker 1: time it would have hit the five o'clock news, But
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like Denis ever picked up. He was
Speaker 1: too busy calling Tom Metzger repeatedly and having his calls ignored.
Speaker 1: A lot of the documents related to this wire tap
Speaker 1: are kind of a riddle to me. They raise a
Speaker 1: lot more questions than they answer. When Agent Morland applied
Speaker 1: for those wire taps, he was exploring a theory of
Speaker 1: this case that included this large cast of co conspirators.
Speaker 1: But by the time the case got to trial, that
Speaker 1: wasn't the theory anymore, that wasn't what was pursued by
Speaker 1: the prosecutor, And so almost none of those names ever
Speaker 1: come up in any other documents related to the case,
Speaker 1: and no evidence was presented at trial to explain these
Speaker 1: flurries of telephone activity on dates that were significant in
Speaker 1: the bombing case, the day the bomb was planted, the
Speaker 1: day the bomb went off, the day the sheriff showed
Speaker 1: up with a warrant for his DNA. Now DNA ended
Speaker 1: up being useless in this case. Dennis was careful. He
Speaker 1: always wore gloves, and he taught Rebecca not to lick stamps.
Speaker 1: But a year before the arrest, a warrant was served
Speaker 1: to swab both brothers for DNA samples, and after that
Speaker 1: sample was taken, Dennis called Tom Metzger and on a
Speaker 1: line he surely did not know was tapped, he said,
Speaker 1: over and over again, I'll never betray you, Tom, I'll
Speaker 1: never betray you. I'll never implicate you. And he doesn't
Speaker 1: say for what. And Tom Metzger doesn't ask, He doesn't
Speaker 1: ask Dennis what he means. He doesn't say implicate me.
Speaker 1: In what he responds, I know you won't. Some of
Speaker 1: the calls to Joe's and Metzger were allowed into evidence
Speaker 1: at trial, but Charles Coons and Edward Gerhardt were nowhere
Speaker 1: to be found. The Wiretop documentation lists even more names
Speaker 1: we never really see again. Dennis received several calls the
Speaker 1: week of the bombing from Tina Higgins, the found of
Speaker 1: a hate group called Central New York White Pride. Agent
Speaker 1: Morland lists the brother's old neighbor, Steve Waddell, as a
Speaker 1: target of the investigation, along with another name I can't
Speaker 1: quite place, Stephen Sawyer. When Agent Morland spoke to Daniel
Speaker 1: Mahon in the morning of the arrest, he told him
Speaker 1: that agents were at Tom Metzger's house at that very moment,
Speaker 1: and he warned Daniel that even more of his friends
Speaker 1: would be getting the same treatment in the near future.
Speaker 1: The transcription of his body camera during this encounter shows
Speaker 1: Moreland telling Daniel that he's just trying to be straight
Speaker 1: with him, telling him, mister Koontz, the Gerhardt brothers, Tina Higgins,
Speaker 1: all them all, this stuff's going on all over the
Speaker 1: country right now, McLaughlin down in Springfield, Sawyer, Waddell. It
Speaker 1: goes on and on, and Daniel laughs and says they'll
Speaker 1: have to get Sawyer to sober up if they want
Speaker 1: to get anything out of him. As far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, none of those other people got raided that day.
Speaker 1: If they did, they never said anything. John McLaughlin, a
Speaker 1: man who was exchanging calls with Dennis on a weekly
Speaker 1: basis for years during the course of this investigation, was
Speaker 1: never mentioned in connection with the case outside of these
Speaker 1: wiretap documents. Maybe Dennis was onto something when he told
Speaker 1: his cellmate that McLaughlin may have been an informant. He
Speaker 1: died in twenty seventeen, so we can't ask him if
Speaker 1: there's a better explanation for this. But in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: the ATF recovered a cash of illegal weapons that he'd
Speaker 1: been stockpiling for the race War, but he wasn't charged federally.
Speaker 1: The ATF let the state of Illinois handle the case,
Speaker 1: and a county judge gave him community service. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: an explanation, but I don't have it. In nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: McLaughlin and HERALDA Rivera were both arrested after they got
Speaker 1: into a fistfight at a clan rally in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Rivera says the man got in his face and called
Speaker 1: him a racial slur. The charges against Rivera were eventually dropped.
Speaker 1: Witnesses say the bloody teeth left on the pavement after
Speaker 1: three cops pulled the reporter off. The clansmen belonged to McLaughlin.
Speaker 1: A local TV news reporter interviewed a bystander for his
Speaker 1: perspective on the brawl. He doesn't give his name, but
Speaker 1: he's wearing a bright yellow ball cap with a white
Speaker 1: Arean Resistance logo on it. And at this point, I'd
Speaker 1: know that voice anywhere. It's Dennis.
Speaker 2: Haraldo. Came with the crowd of protesters. What didn't come
Speaker 2: here to get information out of us? And how he
Speaker 2: feel about things? He came with a crowd because you
Speaker 2: weren't violence. When he got violence, I think he's got
Speaker 2: busts and nose or buts and jaw what he deserves, justly.
Speaker 2: What is he ever going to learn?
Speaker 1: The most maddening detail in the application for the wire
Speaker 1: tap is a passing mention that this isn't the first
Speaker 1: time the atf AS wiretap Dennis Mayhon. They'd done it
Speaker 1: once before, back in nineteen ninety. He'd been suspected of
Speaker 1: involvement in a series of mail bombs in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: One of those bombs killed federal judge Robert Vance in Alabama.
Speaker 1: Another killed Robert Robinson, a black civil rights attorney in Georgia.
Speaker 1: Bombs mailed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in
Speaker 1: Atlanta and the NAACP office in Jacksonville did not go off,
Speaker 1: And early in that investigation, a wire tap recorded Dennis
Speaker 1: boasting about having made package bombs, and he describes with
Speaker 1: great pride the care he took in disguising them well
Speaker 1: and using inconspicuous mailing labels to avoid suspicion, but he
Speaker 1: never said anything specific enough about the targets. He wasn't charged.
Speaker 1: A man named Walter Moody was eventually convicted of those bombings.
Speaker 1: Moody had been to prison once before for making a
Speaker 1: package bomb. In nineteen seventy two, he constructed a pipe
Speaker 1: bomb that he planned to mail to the car dealership
Speaker 1: that had repossessed his car, but before he could get
Speaker 1: it into the mail, his wife saw a box on
Speaker 1: the kitchen counter and opened him. She was badly injured,
Speaker 1: and he was sentenced to five years. And so it
Speaker 1: looks like the theory of these later bombings, the one
Speaker 1: that killed the federal judge, was that Moody wanted revenge
Speaker 1: on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals because they'd refused
Speaker 1: to reverse his conviction in that nineteen seventy two bombing.
Speaker 1: The idea is that he actually only wanted to kill
Speaker 1: Judge Vance, and the other three bombings were an elaborate
Speaker 1: ruse to make the bombing look racially motivated. It sounds
Speaker 1: a little far fetched, but stranger things have happened, and
Speaker 1: bombers aren't always the most rational kinds of guys. It
Speaker 1: borders on beyond belief that Denis Mayhon had no criminal
Speaker 1: record until he was arrested in two thousand nine. He'd
Speaker 1: been investigated in connection with the assassination of a federal
Speaker 1: judge and the deadliest act of domestic terror in American history.
Speaker 1: He was cleared in both investigations, but how many times
Speaker 1: can you be a suspect in something so serious if
Speaker 1: there's nothing going on there? He was banned from Canada,
Speaker 1: the United Kingdom, and Germany. He was designated as a
Speaker 1: terrorist by Interpol. He boasted to reporters about being a
Speaker 1: serial bomber, and for decades he published his Nazi propaganda
Speaker 1: and drank himself to sleep. In the end, I think
Speaker 1: the ATF wanted Tom Metzger. They kept tabs on Dennis
Speaker 1: for years in the hopes that they'd turn up something
Speaker 1: concrete that would lead them to Metzger, but they never did.
Speaker 1: It's impossible to know why they finally made the arrest
Speaker 1: when they did. Most federal crimes have a statute of
Speaker 1: limitations of five years, but these explosive related offenses he
Speaker 1: was charged with are actually an exception to that. So
Speaker 1: they still had more than four years left on a
Speaker 1: ten year clock. And it couldn't have been because they'd
Speaker 1: given up on getting Metzger, because they did try. His
Speaker 1: house was rated, too, but they failed to get enough
Speaker 1: evidence to charge him. I think it's because Dennis's mom
Speaker 1: was dying. That sounds terrible, but I don't mean they
Speaker 1: were trying to exploit his grief or something like that,
Speaker 1: because just a few months before his arrest, Dennis was
Speaker 1: very drunk, as he often was. He and his brother
Speaker 1: had just been to court to get legal guardianship over
Speaker 1: their mother. She was dying, and caring for a loved
Speaker 1: one dying of Alzheimer's disease is a terrible thing to bear,
Speaker 1: and so he's very drunk and he calls Rebecca and
Speaker 1: he leaves her a voicemail. It's a rambling, slurred several minutes,
Speaker 1: but he explains that he's busy taking care of his
Speaker 1: mother right now, and it won't be long. He fully
Speaker 1: expects that she'll pass pretty soon, and he says, when
Speaker 1: she's gone, quote, I'll go back to my radical bomb throwing,
Speaker 1: sniper shooting realm. But until mom passes away, I really
Speaker 1: can't do much. But when she does, look out, Zob,
Speaker 1: look out, because I've got nothing to lose, motherfuckers. I
Speaker 1: will shut the country down on electrical power. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know how to do it. I got the weapon. I
Speaker 1: got the high powered rifles to shoot down the high
Speaker 1: tower power accelerators. And he continues from there, and the
Speaker 1: middle portion is largely unintelligible. There are portions of the
Speaker 1: transcript that are just marked unintelligible. But he picks back
Speaker 1: up by saying, take care, remember, learn, learn, get high
Speaker 1: power weaponry to take out the high power towers, take
Speaker 1: out electrical power. Understand that there's explosives, high powered rifles,
Speaker 1: shoot the insulators. We need to do this when the
Speaker 1: time comes. The time is coming this way. Close Take care, darling.
Speaker 1: Remember the electrical power grid is the Achilles Heel of America.
Speaker 1: Dennis's mother would end up hanging on for another three years,
Speaker 1: passing away just a few weeks after Dennis was sentenced
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve, But in March of two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: it looked like she was on her way out and
Speaker 1: Dennis was getting ready for the race war. And maybe,
Speaker 1: just maybe, this time, when an ATF informant brought them
Speaker 1: credible information that Dennis Mayhon was talking about blowing something up,
Speaker 1: they acted on it. Dennis Mayhon is serving a forty
Speaker 1: year sentence at Tara Hate. He occasionally writes in letters
Speaker 1: to the editor at The Barnes Review, a quarterly Holocaust
Speaker 1: denial magazine founded by Willis Carter. It seems fitting that
Speaker 1: his story ends in the back pages of The Barnes Review.
Speaker 1: One of the earliest mentions I ever found of Dennis
Speaker 1: in white supremacist movement literature was in a nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: one issue of another of Cardo's publications, a newspaper called
Speaker 1: The Spotlight. Dennis and Daniel Mahon were featured in an
Speaker 1: article for their heroic efforts distributing copies of the anti
Speaker 1: Semitic Conspiracy Three newspaper in Florida. From prison. He sometimes
Speaker 1: writes in to boast about all the famous Nazis he
Speaker 1: once knew. He wrote in to tell his fellow readers
Speaker 1: that he used to know Art Jones, he knew Robert Miles,
Speaker 1: he knew Richard Butler. He once claimed that he'd met
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that's true. He was only seventeen when Rockwell was
Speaker 1: shot by one of his own followers. As far as
Speaker 1: the official record is concerned, Dennis Mayhon alone was responsible
Speaker 1: for the package bomb that exploded in the Scottsdale Office
Speaker 1: and Diversity and Dialogue on February twenty six, two thousand
Speaker 1: and four. His brother was acquitted. No one else was
Speaker 1: ever charged in connection with the plot Dennis and Dennis
Speaker 1: alone is guilty of that bombing, but there are no
Speaker 1: lone wolves. Really. Weird Little Guys as a production of
Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded
Speaker 1: by me Ali Konger. Our executive producers are Sophy Electroman
Speaker 1: and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
Speaker 1: talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
Speaker 1: You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
Speaker 1: probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You can
Speaker 1: exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on
Speaker 1: the Weird Little Guys Subredda. Just don't post anything that's
Speaker 1: going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.