Live Wire is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Modulator Media.

Previously on live Wire the Loud Life and Shocking Murder of Alan Burd.

The FEDS took a very we'd have to call it a primary role in investigating the Area Nations as a whole, because they were putting together a RICO prosecution based out of Seattle.

They found a murder weapon in one of the homes of Gary Yarborough, who was one of the order defendants, one of the people suspected in the armored car robbery, and so the birdcase became part of our overall effort.

Agents last October raided his home in Standpoint, Idaho.

It was in that raid that they recovered a submachine.

Gun like this a'm mac kinn, capable of.

Firing one thousand rounds per minute.

The ammunition for them, MA ten is forty five caliber slugs, the same type bullets that killed Alan Berg.

There were several that were drawn to Bob Matthews, whom we had just previously encountered in an hotel in Oregon and had engaged in a gunbatt over one FB agent.

FBI agent was shot and Bob Matthews was shot in the hand, and he had escaped and had taken refuge in a cabin and went along the shoreline of of the ocean with the island.

We moved in to make an arrest on him, and he opened fire on us at the house where he was fighting out.

He was the only one left in the house at that time.

And then eventually the encounter led into the light in the morning, we found Matthews was dead inside the house.

By that time that they accumulated a huge amount of information about the group and its activities and its members.

So by the time we had that standoff in Wouldn't Be Island, they had accumulated most of the information that we would need for our indictment.

Following the lengthy firefight that ended with the death of the order's leader, Robert Matthews, the mission to bring this white supremacist militia to justice preceded in earnest.

One by one, federal officials began the process of indicting a variety of individuals involved in this criminal enterprise bent on installing a new racist order in the United States government, and as the details of this group's crimes emerged, the lead up to the trial became a media fixation.

This is the arraignment that I remember most vividly because it was in downtown Atlanta.

I believe it was in a federal courthouse, and there were media lined up waiting for the arraignment, so it was a beehive of activity.

That's koa radio reporter Lori Cantillo, a friend and colleague of Allen Berg's, who covered every element of this high profile trial.

I was sort of a rising reporter with the station, and I love to challenge.

I believe I pitched for that that.

I said that I would love to work on.

This case, and.

I also have had an interest in.

Hate groups and so forth, so I think I must have pitched for that.

I did most of the early leg work, and like I said, the arraignments and arrests of the members of the order.

I had a listed phone number in the phone book, and one night, in the middle of the night, I picked up the phone and it was a prank call, and it was somebody talking like Alan Berg after he had died, just to harass me, I think.

But that was a very disturbing moment for me, and I remember immediately unlisting my number after that happened.

Twenty three members of the extremist group known as the Order are accused of murders, armed robberies, counterfeiting, and an arson attempt at an actuated theater in Seattle, all to further their message of hate.

The underground network came to light after a fiery shootout on Whitby Island in Washington State, in which leader Robert Matthews were killed.

In all, twenty three members of the Order were indicted by a federal grand jury based in Seattle for a variety of including two armored car robberies in Seattle, counterfeiting, the bombing of a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, the Yucaya, California Brinks armored truck robbery that netted the group three point six million dollars, and of course, their involvement in the murder of alan Berg.

Twelve of the twenty three indicted members pleaded guilty.

The long trial outlined in impressive detail how these crimes were carried out and when it came to the murder of alan Berg.

Prosecutors presented the links the group went to in silencing this prolific radio voice.

Here is David Heckenbach of the Denver District Attorney's office, followed by US Attorney Peter Robinson, who worked out of the Federal office in Northern California.

Once they were able to tell us the story and what they understood about the drive from I think it was Cordelaine, Idaho, down to Denver, the FB I could check the phone records at furious.

I mean, the leg work involved was something staggering.

But because there's an awful lot of payphones back in that day there were no such thing as a cell phones.

We were trying to figure out how this was going to work once we got details.

But at some point we decided we should combine our forces and try to prosecute these people all in one case.

And then once we did that, then we agreed to do it in Seattle because that seemed like more of the hub of where the crimes had been committed.

And also San Francisco.

You know, it was more of a defense friendly jurisdiction.

The defense lawyers were more skilled, the judges were more liberal.

So just from the government's point of view, it was like a better venue to have a more you know, pro law enforcement venue.

I'm a journalists in filmmaker Tellent Panschewski, and this is episode nine the trial of the Order.

Even with the details of their crimes uncovered by the collaborative efforts of federal and local investigators in a number of states, sorting out an ironclad racketeering case would be challenging well.

The racketeering statute required basically that the government proved that there was an enterprise that engaged in two or more federal crimes, and so we described the Order as the enterprise and then listed the various crimes that the members had committed in furtherance of that enterprise, and those included the murder of Alan Berg and another individual named Walter West, who had been suspected as an informant of the group, as well as the armored car robbery in Yukaya, California, some others in Seattle, Washington, some counterfeiting crimes that were committed along the way, as well as some robberies of pornographic stores and things like that.

So we basically listed a number of crimes that became what we call the predicate acts of the racketeering case, and then as prosecutors, we split up those so that some of us were responsible for some of those crimes and other of those crimes, and that was kind of how we organized our trial preparation.

So I was responsible for the Yucaiah robbery.

Jeene Wilson was responsible for Alan Berg's murder, and he was also the overall leader of our case, and other of the lawyers were responsible for crimes in their areas as well.

Well.

The trial judge was Walter McGovern, who was a no nonsense but very personable judge.

Each defendant, there were ten of them in the trial.

They each had their own defense lawyers, and they sat in a couple of benches basically to my left, with a defense lawyer sitting next to his client and the US marshals sitting next to each person, so it was quite crowded in the room.

Then there was a table with myself and the four other prosecutors and a couple of FBI agents who were working with us in the courtroom, and one by one witness we basically presented our case like brick by brick.

Our witnesses would come one by one and give their evidence, and the jury, which was twelve people plus about four alternates, was sitting there listening to all of that.

Surprisingly to me, in the courtroom.

The atmosphere was pretty relaxed despite all the security, because the defendants were pretty friendly and I myself always as a prosecutor, and I think this was maybe because I so to had a defense lawyer mentality also, but I always wanted to treat people with respect when I prosecuted them.

I wanted them to have the dignity of being seen as a human being despite the fact that I was there to have them held accountable for their crimes.

And so I was also friendly to the defendants.

I talked to them at the breaks.

Sometimes I sat next to them and chatted about stuff, and so it was a relaxed atmosphere in the trial itself, although a very serious one and one in which the consequences were quite serious for each of those people who are on trial.

As you could imagine, this trial was a very serious affair.

Media from around the world descended on the courthouse, and more than thirty Deputy marshals were assigned to the trial from across the country, each standing in and around the courtroom with their shotgun in hand.

Additional metal detectors were installed in the courthouse entrance and the chairs occupied by the defendants and their lawyers were all bolted down to the floor.

We started off with the opening statements, and the government's opening statements was given by Bob Wood, who was another prosecutor from San Francisco who came up and worked with me, and he is a very good trial lawyer, and he outlined our whole case to the jury as clearly as we could do it without trying to make it too complicated, because we were worried.

We didn't want there to be it to be too complicated so that they had some reasonable doubt when there wasn't really any if they truly understood.

So Bob did a great job with his closing argument, and then some of the defense lawyers made closing arguments, but I don't believe many of them did.

A defendant has the option of doing it at the beginning of the case or at the beginning of the defense case, but there was no real surprises from the defense at the beginning of the trial.

And then we started putting on witness by witness each of the crimes that were we were trying to prove.

We found out after the bag the Brinx robbery that there had been two employees of Brink's armored car company who were involved in the robbery, and so they provided.

Information to the Order.

They ultimately pled guilty and testified, And so those were two of my witnesses who I prepared and questioned when they came and testified on the witness stand.

In addition, there were members of the Order who had turned state's evidence and became witnesses for the prosecution, and we divided those up, and so I had some of those, and so did all of the other members of our team.

And then most of the people were eyewitnesses, the Brinks drivers, people along the road who had seen them, alan Berg's wife, I believe, testified, and other people who were privy to the allen Berg murder, as well as people at Idaho eastern Washington who had had different transactions with the defendants and knew some things about who was living in different places and things like that that we had to prove.

So that took up most of the four months of the trial.

As the case was made by prosecutors, the full organizational configuration of the Order was presented in exhausting detail.

How different members took on specific roles and earned salaries as well as bonuses for certain criminal acts and how these crimes were committed to further the group's ultimate goal of overthrowing America's quote Zionist occupied government unquote.

While these arguments presented by federal prosecutors unveiled the Order's numerous crimes and great detail, they also, for the first time offered a blow by blow account of who had murdered Allenberg and how they had done it.

Here is FBI agent Wayne Mannis.

We were able to ascertain and improve that that the people that were responsible for the assassination of Allenberg was Robert Matthews for one David Lane, the individual I mentioned earlier had had that very controversial conversation with him over his talk show, an individual by the name of Robert Scutari, and the actual trigger man who was in charge of assassinations for the Order, an individual by the name of Bruce Cheryl.

Puis for Allen Burke's friends and colleagues who were still grieving the loss of this larger than life figure.

It was a startling revelation to learn who had committed this heinous crime, But there was a new detail unfurled by the investigation that showed how far the Order had gone to track down and murder Alan Burke.

There was a lady by the name of Jean Craig who was closely affiliated to Robert Matthews, and she went to get for a week before the assassination and did a very thorough job.

Of identifying Alan Berg, his friend, his association's activities on a daily basis.

She followed him and surveilled him and knew exactly where he worked, toward his residence, was when he generally gotten home from work, what he did in terms of any recreational activity, and provided all that information to the assassination group.

Jean Craig wasn't just any member of the order.

Her daughter, Zilla Craig, was the girlfriend of the group's leader, Robert Matthews, and was the mother of one of his children.

As a middle aged woman who looked the part of a starstruck fan, nobody questioned it when Geene Craig arrived at KOA Studios looking for Alan Burke.

We later learned that the radio station itself had been cased by Gen Craig, who had posed as a prize winner and apparently had been escorted around the station.

So the thought that these killers had actually been in our midst was scary.

Here is koa producer Susan Ryman, followed by station manager Lee Larson.

You know, if you think about it, these people came to Denver to kill him.

Jean Craig came into our building and asked for a media kid.

They later found Allen's press picture riddled with bulletles.

They used different target practice.

They were in sane.

A number of the people from the radio station were among the witnesses of the trial because one of the co conspirators was a lady who had visited the radio station pretending to be a fan of Alan's and asking some of our promotion people if they had pictures of him, if they had any other information about him, that she was just such a fan and wanted to know all about him.

For alan Berg's friends and colleagues, this new detail in his murder truly hit home.

The Order had spent some time profiling and tracking alan Berg before murdering him, even sending one of their own to step foot in their studio knowing that Gene Craig had been dispatched to their place of work to conduct reconnaissance on Burke only poked at an emotionally traumatic wound that remained fresh more than a year after alan Berg's murder.

As nineteen eighty four starts, the Order decides to up there White power revolution.

They start committing robberies, they start counterfeiting money, and they start plotting who should we assassinate first to really show the severity of what we're going to do.

They talk about Henry Kissinger, loner secretaries there.

They talk about Norman ly Or, television producer All the Family, other shows.

David Lane is in the group.

David Lane is from Denver.

He says, I know this guy in Denver.

He's a loud mouth.

He's on the radio.

He's always trying to stir things up.

He's always going against people like us who have our beliefs and our ideas.

Why don't we go to Denver and make this our first target?

And so they begin to make plans in the spring of nineteen eighty four.

This is alan Berg biographer Stephen Singer.

They send Jean Craig down to Denver to do surveillance on Burg.

They figure out, you know, exactly what he looks like.

Very few people would be mistaken for Ellenberg.

He was about six foot two or three.

He weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds.

He was ramrod thin.

He had grown long, bushy gray hair to cover the scars that had been left on his head from his surgery.

He had a beard.

He was very striking looking in many ways.

Then he dressed very very well.

They do the surveillance.

They figure out where he lives, they figure out where he works, They figure out what his routine is, coming to work, going home from work, and they have everything planned out.

We rested our case and then it was the defense turn to put on witnesses.

They didn't call very many, but one of them Artie mcbreerdy, who was a gentleman from Arkansas who had helped them the order and some of their activities.

He testified in his own behalf and I cross examined him.

And then the defense rested, and then we had our closing arguments, and Gene Wilson gave the main closing argument for the government.

I also gave some part of it, and another person from Seattle named Peter Mueller gave our rebuttal argument.

All of the defense lawyers made closing arguments in which they tried to point out issues of reasonable doubt in our case, and ultimately Judge McGovern gave the jury their instructions to what the law was that they were to apply to the facts that they heard.

After a trial lasting several months, a verdict was reached and read in February of nineteen eighty six.

In all, ten members of the Order were tried and convicted under Rico statutes.

Gary Lee Brough was sentenced to sixty years in prison, Bruce Carrol Pierce, the man who pulled the trigger, one hundred years.

Upon his sentencing, Pierce stood in the courtroom and told Federal District Judge Walter McGovern, I am not going to waste my time or your time and beg for mercy.

Whatever I did, I did to bring honor to myself and glory to my brothers, and glory to God.

In a pre sentencing report, Assistant United States Attorney David Wilson wrote of Pierce that he could not recall ever having faced a defendant who was a more frightening danger to society.

Order member Randolph George Dewey received one hundred years, Richard Kemp sixty years, Andrew Barnhill, whose weapon had been recovered at the scene of the Prince Armored truck robbery that broke the whole case open.

Received forty years.

And then it was at the end of December.

There was a period of time when the jury was deliberating and they it was about four or five days, I think, and then finally they just announced that they had reached a verdict, and we all came back to court and we listened to the verdict and everyone was found guilty and the trial was over.

Oh.

Overjoyed when they were convicted, of.

Course, I felt that, you know, however many years they're going to lock them up.

It wasn't enough.

And I was happy to hear when some of them died in prison.

I have to say I was relieved, because you never want to screw up a case like that, you know.

So I was expecting that we would win, but with a jury, you never know, and so I was That was my main emotion when I heard the verdict, was just relief.

Okay, we didn't screw it up.

Afterwards, it became very difficult to work on the routine cases that I had in the Northern District of California as a prosecutor.

Was I felt like I had had my biggest challenge as a prosecutor and that was never going to be replicated again.

And so, you know, a few years later, I did decide to leave the US Attorney's office, And that was basically the reason that I just thought I had done everything as a prosecutor that I could do in the ten years that I had been an assistant US attorney, and I was ready for a new challenge.

So yeah, that was pretty much the highlight of my career as a prosecutor.

In a separate trial in nineteen eighty seven in Denver, Pierce and Lane were found guilty of violating Alan Berg's civil rights.

Two other defendants in the trial, Jean Craig and Richard Scutari, were found not guilty.

All four were already serving lengthy prison sentences following the Seattle Rico trial the previous year.

Pearson Lane both died in prison.

Richard Scutari was sentenced to sixty years in prison in Seattle, and according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he maintained extensive connections with white supremacist activists in the United States, Sweden, and Finland while in prison.

Scutari was granted early release last year, and according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, was released from their custody on January twenty first, twenty twenty five.

Before his release, I reached out to Scutari last year through the Bureau of Prisons.

He declined my request for an interview with the Order disbanded and its members in prison, the shocking final chapter of Allenberg's remarkable life officially came to a close.

But even more startling than the details that emerged of his murder or the shocking story of how the Order hunted Alan Berg down, was how little attention was paid to Berg in the years following his murder.

In and around Denver, where he had emerged as one of the most prominent voices on local radio, he was mostly forgotten, no plaque or statue commemorating his place in the community, not even an alley named after him, and in the vast media landscapes he had helped shape as one of the most dynamic voices in radio, he was completely unknown, even while some of his contemporaries became legends in the field.

But with the help of some of his old friends, a renewed appreciation for Berg and his incredible career recently emerged around Denver, an appreciation that helped cement his prominent place in radio history.

All that and more in the final episode of live Wire, the Loud life and shocking Murder of Alan Berg.

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