Out of the past

Just because I like to be able to laugh every now and then at the white supremacists I often find myself writing about, I thought I'd share this ...

Former neo-Nazi speaks about life in the hate lane

This is mostly an interview with Tom Martinez, the informant who was responsible for breaking up The Order. I find it interesting that he's making himself this public. Good for him; it appears he's genuinely repentant. Martinez -- who claimed he was Spanish and insisted on having his name pronounced MAR-ti-nez -- was a genuine lizard of a character who hung out on the street corners of Philadelphia and handed out hate literature, which is how he hooked up with Robert Mathews.

Near the end of the piece, I noted this paragraph:

The Order hired a hitman to kill Martinez during his counterfeiting trial in 1985. Fortunately, he said, the hitman was an undercover FBI agent. "He saved my life."

There's even more to this story. Here's an excerpt from Jess Walter's excellent Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family (pp. 70-71, hardcover):

A few months later [after The Order convictions had finally been completed], [U.S. attorney Ron] Howen was prosecuting Elden "Bud" Cutler, the security chief for the Ayran Nations, who was arrested and charged with hiring a hit man to kill Thomas Martinez, the FBI informant who broke The Order. Unfortunately, the hit man Cutler hired to behead Martinez was an FBI agent who had infiltrated the group.

Howen handled the prosecution. A young attorney named David Nevin, who was raised on the other side of a black neighborhood in Louisiana and who grew up abhorring racism, was Cutler's defense attorney. But to Nevin, Cutler's beliefs -- no matter how awful -- were beside the point. This was a classic case of entrapment, sending an FBI agent to a simple man and coaxing him into paying to have someone killed. But Howen laid out the intricate kind of case he'd participated in with The Order, tying Cutler's beliefs into the conspiracy to kill the informant. Still, Nevin thought he had a chance, until the government played a tape of his client looking at a doctored picture of Martinez that purported to show him after he'd been decapitated. "Goddamn," Cutler said. "You guys really did it." It didn't help Nevin's case that his client wanted a copy of the picture.

Cutler was given a 12-year sentence. He got out in 1998.