Here Comes Trouble (41 page)

The newscaster told the story of what happened in Vienna and Rome with a beginning, a middle, and an end—and, even though I had been right there, it was like I wasn’t. Someone who
truly wasn’t
there—
this anchorman in
Atlanta, Georgia
—knew more than I did! And at that moment I became part of that select group of people from the late twentieth century who were present at an act of terrorism. I sat up on the bed and felt the way most said they had felt on the grassy knoll in Dallas on that day some two decades earlier. You knew something bad had happened, you
think
you saw something horrific, but it
couldn’t be that,
just
couldn’t be that!
And it was all over so quick your brain could not take the images fast enough from the corneas and process them into a reasonable explanation of what just occurred. As there was no play-by-play in Dealey Plaza or at the Vienna Airport, there was no one there to be your narrator, your guide—your calm, soothing voice that could make sense of it all for you. And to comfort you. But you can’t be comforted. Because you did not watch this on a twenty-five-inch screen in a bar in Boulder;
you were there.
And you are not your own narrator because it’s not a “story” to
you
—it’s a real goddamned moment of “Am I going to survive?” And what the
fuck
is going on here? The TV explained it all to me. On the plane earlier I was relatively calm—confused, yes; worried, definitely. But I kept it together, as did everyone else on the plane. We knew people had died. But we also needed to go to the bathroom.

Now, for the first time that day, eyes affixed to CNN, I began to shake, and then cry. Hard. The story on the TV box was more real than the real I had been so close to. I thought about those twenty minutes of the plane being late to that gate. I picked up the phone and called my wife back in America. She had been calling everywhere trying to find me. I was quiet. And then I began to cry again.

Hot Tanned Nazi

Y
ES, SHE WAS HOT
. Yes, she was tanned. She had long blonde hair and a sweet smile. What was she doing here?

I walked over to ask her that very question, but at that moment her Nazi boyfriend stepped in (no, I don’t mean her boyfriend was
acting
like a “Nazi,” I mean he was a
real
Nazi in a black storm trooper uniform). He took her by the arm and walked her over to his Ford Econoline van, slid open the door, and loaded her into the back so they could, I presume, make tender Nazi love on a sunny April afternoon.

A few weeks earlier I had received a call from James Ridgeway, the political columnist for the
Village Voice
in New York City. He wanted to make a documentary on the rise of the extremist right wing in the Midwest in the wake of the Reagan recession. The economy was in the toilet for any place that did manufacturing, and Flint, Michigan, was especially hard hit. The various far right movements saw these out-of-work autoworkers as potential recruits for their Aryan supremacist movement. They had a simple answer as to why Flint was beginning to come apart: “It’s the niggers and the Jews!” That didn’t play well with most people, but it did draw enough of those who were at the end of their rope to consider the teachings and preachings of these men.

Robert Miles was the former head of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan. He was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and if you looked at him you’d never guess he was one of the most notorious Grand Wizards of the Klan. He was soft-spoken, intelligent, literate, and had this disarming New York accent that made him sound more like a priest in a Bing Crosby movie than an avowed racist who spent seven years in prison for setting fire to ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, his contribution to trying to halt that district’s integration plan.

Miles believed in violence and the separation of the races. He wanted the U.S. government to declare an “all-white” area where white people could go and live in peace: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and the state of Washington. He would give the Hispanics Arizona and New Mexico, and the blacks could have the states of the Deep South.

In order to pull off this revolution, he needed to gather together the disparate groups that made up the white supremacist movement and get them to agree to work together. So he put out a call for a convention of racists to take place on an April weekend in the spring of 1986 on his farm south of Flint. Everyone twisted and white, regardless of their differences, was invited: the various Klan groups, the Aryan Nations, the American Nazis, Christian Identity, the white power conclaves—you name it, if it was racist and nuts, it was going to be there.

Ridgeway had called me to see if I might be able to convince Grand Dragon Miles to let him and his crew into the gathering to film it. He was certain the answer would be no, but he wanted to see if I could give it a shot and try to convince them.

I hosted a weekly radio show on the rock station in Flint called
Radio Free Flint.
I had had Mr. Miles on my show a couple of times. I was exactly the type of vermin that he and his people wanted to rid the earth of, but he couldn’t have been nicer or more polite when he visited the radio station.

So I thought I could convince him to do this. I understood that when someone’s mind has taken a psychotic turn it’s hard to reverse that. Clearly, in his case, prison didn’t do the job. He had his beliefs set in cement: he saw white people as the chosen people, and everyone else was here to serve us. Not a bad setup if you’re the white guy, eh?

I called Bob and asked him if I could come out to his farm to ask him a favor. He was delighted to hear from me and invited me out to have lunch on a Friday afternoon. His wife, a gregarious and good-hearted woman, made a pot of Irish stew and homemade biscuits and some fresh-brewed ice tea. He sat and talked to me about his early years in New York City. As a teenager he joined a youth group whose main activity was to go down on weekends to Union Square and beat the crap out of socialists and communists. He went to George Washington High School, where Henry Kissinger was a year ahead of him.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miles joined the Navy and fought for the duration of the war. When he got out, he and his wife moved to Michigan, where he became an insurance man. He would eventually rise to become the head of the Michigan Association of Insurance Executives. In those days, insurance men went door to door to convince people why they needed life insurance and a homeowner’s policy. It was hard work, as this new demographic known as “the middle class” were unfamiliar with the concept of giving someone their hard-earned money for something they might never use. To succeed in the insurance business back then, you had to be a smooth talker but also be able to possess the voice of reason—and of fear. You had to make a family fear all the possible what-ifs: what if my house burns down, what if my child gets sick, what if I die before my time and leave my family penniless. It wasn’t long before nearly everyone had someone whom they referred to as their own personal “insurance man.”

Bob Miles must have been great at it, and once he crossed over to the dark side of the Klan, he was the perfect recruiter for the Aryan Nations—your friendly insurance man selling you a simple policy to protect yourself from the crazy “mud people” who are coming to burn down your house, steal your daughters, and take your life. His pitch was gentle and it sounded reasonable. He had a skill set the average redneck didn’t possess, and he used it to build the Michigan Klan into one of the most potent racist groups in the country.

But on this Friday afternoon, as another pot of tea was brewing, Miles said he was more than happy to let my “Hollywood” friends come to his farm and film him and his convocation.

“I know you don’t believe in what we’re doing,” he said, as he wiped the bottom of the stew dish with his white powdered biscuit, “but I think if you get to know us you will see that we don’t have horns or a tail. All we ask is that you honestly show what you see here and let the people in the theater decide for themselves.”

I told him that James Ridgeway was bringing two co-directors with him: a woman, Anne Bohlen, who had received an Oscar nomination for a short film about the Flint Sit-Down Strike, and Kevin Rafferty, who had made a number of documentaries. I told him that they do not editorialize in their movies, that they don’t use a narrator, that they just like to be flies on the wall and let the cameras roll. He liked all of that and gave his blessing for his gathering of hate groups to be featured in a movie.

Ridgeway, Bohlen, and Rafferty flew in the day before the convention so they could meet me and map out a plan. It was the first time I had ever been around a film crew or anything like this. I was all ears.

“OK,” said Kevin Rafferty, who was clearly the leader of the pack. “Mike, they trust you, so you stick by us. No need to say anything; we’ll direct the questions. Jim’s done all the research. Just hang nearby if we need you.”

“Sure,” I said, excited about being part of a film crew, whatever that meant. “Whatever you need.”

“I’ll be on the main camera, Robert will be second camera [Robert Stone, the acclaimed documentary director of
Radio Bikini
], and Anne [Bohlen] will do sound with Charlie and Mo [two film students]. We’re a pretty big crew, so we want to try to blend in and not get in their way.”

“Blending in” was not possible. When we arrived at Miles’s farm, greeting us were a few hundred solid American citizens bedecked in Nazi uniforms, spiffy sportswear emblazoned with various versions of the swastika, KKK outerwear, Aryan Nations buttons and badges, sashes that proclaimed white power and Christian superiority, and a whole lotta guys and gals who looked like they did not follow the cautionary guidelines from the National Institutes of Health regarding the downside of breeding within one’s family.

They viewed us with appropriate suspicion, yet nearly all were willing to be filmed. All, except Miles’s two co-gurus: Robert Butler, the head of the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and William Pierce, head of the National Alliance (the descendants of the American Nazi Party) and author of
The Turner Diaries,
a novel about America being overthrown by Jews, which leads to a race war in which all Jews and nonwhites are exterminated.
⁸

Pierce and Butler were clearly smart enough to know we were up to no good, and they did not share Bob Miles’s attitude that they had nothing to hide. Miles was treated like the elder statesman of the event and, because this was his farm, all others deferred to his decisions, even if somewhat reluctantly. We were allowed to stay.

We began to spend time with some of the attendees. They were not shy with us.

“Who are you?” one man angrily asked, as he got right up into our collective face. “Where are you from? You working with the Feds?”

“We’re from New York,” Anne responded while doing her best to hide her nervousness.

“Figures—a bunch of Jews!” he grumbled. “I’m a violent anti-Sematic! I hate ’em all,” he said as he started to walk away.

“None of us are Jews,” Kevin said, trying to relax the man so he would keep talking. I picked up on his cue.

“I’m not from New York,” I offered. “I’m from right here.”

As I was not well-known at this time—and, truthfully, I looked a lot like most of them—the man turned around, sized me up, and continued on, speaking only to me.

“You don’t look like a race traitor. You are white and this is your country. It’s been taken from us by a bunch of race traitors. I will not rest until they are all removed.”

I kept the best straight race-traitor face that I could. There were six of us and two hundred of them. We had cameras, they had guns. Lots of them, I presumed. It was like we were the ducks in a shooting gallery, but instead of bopping up and down from thirty feet away, here we were walking among the most vile, hateful, and scary people you could conjure up in the U.S.A. I thought,
This is really stupid to be on this farm in the middle of nowhere.

I was not alone in this thinking. Kevin and Jim suggested we head back to the van and regroup. When we got outside of earshot of the supremacists, Jim expressed the collective sentiment of the group.

“I don’t want to be on camera,” he said to Kevin. “I don’t think any of us should be on camera. It’s too dangerous.”

“The last thing I want,” added Anne, “is for them to know who I am or where I live when this film comes out.”

“I think that’s smart,” said Kevin, concurring with the sanity being expressed. Then he turned to the least sane one of the group.

“How ’bout you, Mike? You doing OK? I like how you interacted with that guy. You feel like doing more of that?”

Kevin, the director, was now casting—and he was casting me as the sacrificial lamb! I had no clue why you would have to worry about people hating you once they see you in a movie mocking the shit out of them.