SEVEN

DUST ROSE OFF the driveway like fog on a river as the summer of 1987 dragged on, hot and dry as any in memory. David and Jeane came for their yearly visit in late August, bringing more boxes of clothes and books for the kids. Sara, who was eleven, dove into the books, but that was no great shock, because she was so much like Vicki her grandparents expected her to be a good reader. Sam was the surprising one. A couple summers before, you couldn’t force a book into his hands, but by 1987, he read everything he got his hands on, and it wasn’t long before well-worn paperbacks filled up the kids’ bookshelves and gathered in piles under their beds: Trixie Belden, The Black Stallion, Heart of the Blue Ridge, Saddle and Ride, Eight Cousins. Sam loved adventure stories and books about warfare—The Story of the Green Berets and Naval Battles and Heroes.

Soon, Sam was reading and memorizing encyclopedias and Sara would get frustrated when they’d get into an argument over some piece of trivia and Sam would always be right.

Vicki’s first date for Armageddon had passed without any trouble, and back in Iowa her family got the feeling she was mellowing a bit, maybe even finding her place in the rough life of northern Idaho. David and Jeane’s visits had become nice breaks for both families, and as usual Jeane and her daughter stayed up all night canning fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and talking about all the nieces and nephews.

David and Jeane were amazed at the amount of work Vicki did. Besides teaching and taking care of three children, she kept the house repaired and served as doctor, cook, and caretaker for the whole family. In just a few days, she canned fourteen quarts of green beans, seven quarts of pears, and seven quarts of fruit cocktail—peaches, pears, red grapes and honeydew melon—all of it while bent over a stoked woodstove in the searing August heat. She and Sara planted, picked, and canned all manner of vegetables, not to mention mustard greens and nettles. Vicki studied books about medicinal and edible plants and herbs, and her knowledge of gardening made her the equivalent of a country doctor who, in her chatty letters back home, prescribed teas and roots for the ailments of people in Iowa.

That summer, Sammy especially enjoyed his grandparents’ visit and couldn’t wait for them to return the next year, so he could “show Grandpa around my mountain again.” Samuel led the smiling, bowlegged David up to mountain streams, where the nine-year-old proudly fished for four-and five-inch brook trout. Sam would jerk them out of the water, slip ‘em off the hook and slit ‘em up the belly, clean them with his thumb, and then they’d go back and panfry them for dinner. When David asked for a walking stick, Sam ran into the draw near their house and brought back a light, smooth birch limb, then another and another, until David had six to choose from. It became a game for all the kids, finding the best, smoothest, lightest, strongest stick for the aging but energetic Grandpa David.

When he wasn’t walking with the boy, David always found work to do around the cabin, like helping Vicki rig up her washing machine, a gas-powered monster from the 1920s, with a kick start and an engine that looked like it could run a helicopter. With nothing to cook on but the woodstove, the house heated up like a toaster, and so David built Vicki a screen door and hung it up so they could leave the door open without feeding half the flies in Idaho. He fixed the plumbing, set up the water system and—as he’d done to his own house forty years earlier—soldered a sidearm onto the woodstove to heat water for a shower. David was the kind of guy who couldn’t be still. Besides, anything was better than sitting around, listening to Randy and Frank Kumnick talk. Randy had gotten a construction job nearby, working on a log cabin that was being built. But too often, it seemed to David, he sat around smoking and talking with Kumnick about all these wild ideas that David didn’t really want to hear about.

David Jordison never much cared for Kumnick. He would get to talking about this conspiracy or that plan and he was just the kind of guy to get Randy all riled up and into trouble. On the drive back to Iowa, he told Jeane: “Pete should stay away from that guy.”

After David and Jeane left that summer of 1987, the family got ready for the barter fair, one of the kids’ favorite events, a gathering of every social stratum in the woods: the loggers, the second-generation hippies, and the other Christian survivalists. That year, Sara sold cookies and popcorn balls.

The three Weaver children were doing well, David and Jeane thought. Those first years, Vicki kept pretty strict hours for their school, starting it in the morning and not releasing them until the afternoon. Although Randy and Vicki said the kids didn’t need anything but home schooling, they told all three children that, if they really wanted to, any of them could go into town and brave the Beast’s public school for a while.

“All you got to do is learn to read, write, arithmetic through maybe the eighth grade,” Randy told them. “And then you can make it on your own.” He didn’t guess any of his kids would make it in public school, though, because they were being taught to question authority the way he did, and he figured they’d just get kicked out for arguing with the teacher.

None of the kids wanted to go to public school anyway. They were happy where they were.

The children also became more involved spiritually, although Sara said her parents didn’t push her into the beliefs. “Don’t take my word for things,” her father would say. “Look into it yourself.” They never felt brainwashed or trained in any way, Sara said. They were just a family.

And they were pretty happy, enjoying the world more and obsessing less about its end. Vicki had even taken a job refinishing antique furniture. It had been one of her many talents growing up, and now she dove back into refinishing and completed three good pieces in just a few weeks for a local refinisher. “Maybe when the kids are raised, I’ll have my own shop,” Vicki wrote her mother in November 1987.

IN THE FALL OF 1987, after Vicki’s date for Armageddon passed, the Weavers looked hard for a place to house-sit, to get off the mountain for the winter. Eventually they found a place, but they had to rent it, a cute red house with a river rock foundation, just off the highway, with a telephone and a satellite dish. They were living in civilization. The family seemed to be emerging from their paranoia, and Vicki’s parents hoped they had come out of the darkness. The Weavers even agreed to pose for pictures, and back in Iowa, Vicki’s sister and brother couldn’t believe how much the kids had grown. Sara was almost as tall and pretty as her mother, Sam was a little man, and Rachel was growing up even cuter than they’d remembered her.

When David and Jeane visited in 1988 and 1989, while the Weavers lived in the house at the bottom of the hill, they had the best times they could remember. Jeane took all the kids into town for some shopping, and they hit a few garage sales, looking for the denim skirts that all the Weaver girls wore. Later, they drove up a road that rivaled their own mountain driveway for inaccessibility, until they came to an open field and a wall of huckleberry bushes. They all piled out and began picking huckleberries. The kids found a small lake to swim and fish in while the adults picked buckets full of the bright purple berries. Tourists had discovered the Northwest’s huckleberry pies, and so when they took the huckleberries to the local fruit stand, the grocer gave them an incredible deal, trading a few gallons for a pickup load of apples, plums, and peaches. Vicki and Jeane stayed up all night canning.

It was around that time that David helped Randy and Vicki build an eight-by-fourteen movable outbuilding about the size of a bedroom and shaped like a tiny barn. Vicki said they would use it for a guest house, a place for people to sleep when they visited the mountain. The house was also used as a retreat for Vicki when she was menstruating. God had shown her that she was unclean during her periods and that she should separate herself from the family and pray until the time had passed. In Iowa, when Julie heard about the menstruation shed, it reminded her of the baths Vicki used to take in Cedar Falls. She wondered if, deep down, the shed was just a way for Vicki to get away from the family and get some rest.

Nothing came of the Secret Service investigation; the Wohalis moved; and even the problems with the Kinnisons were turning out okay. Terry and his wife had filed a $9,000 lien against Randy and Vicki, trying to collect the money they claimed to have put in and the work they’d done on the barn. But the Weavers hired Everett Hofmeister, a Coeur d’Alene attorney who represented, among other people, Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan Nations. With Hofmeister as their attorney, the Weavers countersued.

Terry Kinnison and his family had moved to Alaska, and he wrote the court a half dozen times asking them just to drop the whole thing.

“I do not have the money to pay any more attorneys,” Kinnison wrote.

I did not [do] one thing wrong. I am guilty of nothing. I do not wish nor have ever wished to fight anyone…. I can no longer take the stress of all this. So just give the Weavers the lien. But Sir, I will not pay the man or any one individual involved any amount of money. I will not. I have given all I will give. So give them the lien papers and let it go…. And may the God of Abraham rebuke them for what they have done.

Unfortunately for Kinnison, the God of Abraham didn’t decide the case, and since Kinnison didn’t show up for court, Randy and his family were awarded $1,000 in damages and another $1,100 in costs and attorneys’ fees. Eventually, the money was garnished from a small land settlement that was still going to the Kinnisons.

Even though their racism was progressing and Randy had become interested in the Aryan Nations, it seemed to the Jordisons that Randy and Vicki had come through some long, dangerous time. Now, Vicki’s family thought, as long as Randy stays out of trouble, everything will be okay.

RANDY WAS IN TOWN AGAIN, and he was ready to talk. There was no Sambo’s in Naples, Idaho, so he did the best he could, hanging out with friends at their houses or at the restaurant at the Deep Creek Inn. He went to a couple more gatherings at the Aryan Nations, became friendly with some of the members, bought a belt buckle there, and talked about the movement with Frank Kumnick and others.

Randy had also begun to talk about fixing the messed-up system. He’d been in conversations where guys like Frank said that revolution was the way to repair things, but he and Vicki took a more biblical approach, figuring God would let them know if violence was needed. Yet Randy was also living in the world again, and so he and Vicki began asking God whether one man—Randy—couldn’t try to fix the world, at least the part of it in Boundary County. So he went to a few public meetings, including one held by the state game department where Weaver reportedly stood up and said that if he couldn’t shoot grizzly bears, and one of his kids got mauled by a bear, he might come back and shoot the people at the meeting.

In 1987, Boundary County formed a Human Rights Task Force like the one in Kootenai County, after white separatist Robert Miles suggested he might move his 2,000-member Mountain Church from Cohoctah, Michigan, to Bonners Ferry. At one meeting, after the group showed a Canadian documentary about the Aryan Nations, a gully-cheeked man stood up and addressed the task force. Randy Weaver said the film was all wrong. He’d been to the Aryan Nations, and the people here were misunderstanding their message. He said Jews were running the world’s economic system, and groups like the Aryan Nations were only trying to help America get back on its feet. The Human Rights Task Force, Randy said, was denying whites their civil rights. It was a classic Randy speech.

Later, he said he’d been unimpressed with the task force. “The only thing they’re concerned with is white racists, that’s what bothers me,” he told a newspaper reporter. “They don’t show any movies on black racists…. There are lots of Indian racists in this county.”

That spring, Randy figured out how he could change the system and maybe keep his family in food and clothes for good. He announced his candidacy for sheriff, running on the Republican ticket. He figured he was a good candidate; trained in Special Forces, he’d been involved in investigations in the army and had never had a criminal record. In fact, it seemed he’d been planning to run for quite a while. He told friends that one reason the family moved down off the mountain was so Randy could do a better job campaigning. But he didn’t have a lot of money, and so he handed out business cards with “Vote Weaver for Sheriff” written on them. On the other side was written “Get out of jail free.”

He was like the college radical who runs for student body president, promising to abolish student government. Randy said Boundary County had turned into a business, feeding itself on the people by taxing and fining them until their needs were secondary to the Beast, to feeding and keeping the revenue-monster going. The philosophy of Randy’s campaign was a long-standing right-wing thought: that the sheriff was the only legitimate law in the county and the place to begin repairing the screwed-up government.

But if Randy’s candidacy was right-wing dogma, it was also good-old-boy neighborliness. He promised to enforce only the laws the local people wanted, so that if locals voted to allow drunken driving, he’d enforce it that way. Seat belts and motorcycle helmets were stupid, he said.

“I question whether they should pass any laws to protect the individual from themselves,” he told a newspaper reporter. “I believe in what I call Scriptural socialism: take care of your neighbor.”

His candidacy got the attention of the Spokesman-Review from nearby Spokane, Washington, the largest newspaper in the area. And so one of its reporters, who was based in Sandpoint, called Weaver at the little house on the highway where he was living and interviewed him. But after a wide-ranging interview, Randy got mad and said that he’d assumed the reporter was just chatting with him and that he’d never given permission for an article to be written. The reporter said he’d identified himself at the beginning of the conversation and that, clearly, he was interviewing Randy for a story. Randy said the media adhered to the One World Government and would twist his words and make his candidacy some sort of race issue, when that wasn’t it at all. “If you want to make a racial issue out of this thing, they’re going to bring busloads of blacks here to prove a point,” he said. “The people up here don’t want that. I don’t want that.”

Furious, Randy said that if his quotes were used in the story, he would call his attorney and sue the newspaper. The next day, the story ran on an inside page, under the headline “Boundary Sheriff Candidate Opposed to Mixed Marriages.”

“I have been to the Aryan Nations World Congress to see what’s going on,” Randy was quoted as saying in the May 21 issue of the Spokesman-Review. “I’ve also been to the Boundary County Task Force on Human Rights. Both have good things.”

Randy said he wasn’t a member of the Aryan Nations, but he shared their beliefs that the Constitution was being subverted and that interracial marriage was against God’s will. Still, he said, “some of my best friends are of other races.” He said he also shared the group’s belief in a white-dominated America and that the Constitution had to apply mainly to white people “when you consider that it was white folks that wrote the Constitution and some of those folks owned slaves.

“I don’t believe in slavery,” Randy added, “but, religiously speaking, I don’t believe in mixing the races.”

Sheriff in such a large, sparsely and strangely populated county was often a difficult job to fill. In 1983, the sheriff of Boundary County had gone to Alaska for a vacation and just never returned. His chief deputy assumed the job because there was no one else, and then, five years later, he quit, too. But in 1988, there were five people eager to jump into the spot, three Democrats and two Republicans. On the Democratic side was a part-time school bus driver, a bartender, and Boundary County’s first-ever bailiff. Running for the Republicans were Lonnie Ekstrom, the chief investigator for the sheriff’s office, and Randy Weaver.

Ekstrom said Randy’s views of law enforcement were impossible. “He’s much more radical that he lets on,” Ekstrom said.

In a county of 7,000 registered voters, 1,500 people voted—most of them for Democrats. Randy got 102 votes, which some folks took as a pretty good estimate of the number of white separatists and constitutionalists in their county. Randy lost the Republican primary to Ekstrom, who had 383 votes.

THERE WAS A DISPUTE between Randy Weaver and Steve Tanner over $30,000 that Tanner said belonged to him. It was one of those strange mountain deals that no one wanted to talk about above a whisper. But some people in the Naples area just knew what they saw—the Weavers suddenly renting this nice house on the highway, driving a new Ford Ranger pickup, quickly buying and selling other rigs.

Tanner called his friends in the area—including the Raus, who lived below the Weavers’ cabin—and told them about the dispute. Once again, Randy and Vicki Weaver were at the center of a Boundary County feud.

Some of their former friends theorized that, once the Weavers decided someone wasn’t one of God’s chosen, they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that person. Everyone was either on their side or was part of the great conspiracy. Their severe beliefs didn’t leave any room in the middle. People figured the Weavers were so desperate to provide for themselves and prepare for the Great Tribulation they could justify any action. Whatever the truth, the fact was that almost all the initial friends the Weavers had made when they came to Bonners Ferry were now enemies.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, the whole family was planning to go to the Aryan Nations World Congress. Ever since they’d arrived in Idaho, the Weavers had been drifting toward Christian Identity, the racist religion of the skinheads and the Aryan Nations. They called God “Yahweh” and Jesus “Yashua” (and later “Yahshua”) and eventually dropped the word Christian entirely from the description of their beliefs, saying they were Identity believers. If you looked up the word cretin in the dictionary, they pointed out, you’d find a reference to the word Christian. They’d picked up books and literature at the Aryan Nations before, and Randy and Vicki had found some things to help in their latest project—researching old Hebrew words (like Yahweh) and trying to find the holy words that had been replaced in the English language by pagan words. Humans, for instance, weren’t white people, they were hue (color), mans (people). Aryans were the true people chosen by Yahweh. Sammy picked up his mother’s love for language and devoured the Bible, while Sara studied the way her mother prayed and understood that their religion was different from everyone else’s because of the way it was revealed directly to them by the Creator.

Even though they agreed with many of the tenets of Richard Butler’s church, there were differences. For instance, the Weavers celebrated the sabbath from Friday at 6:00 p.m. to Saturday at 6:00 p.m., while the Aryans held a traditional Sunday celebration. There were other reasons Randy had resisted joining the group. He told friends that Aryan Nations was filled with ex-cons and others he didn’t want to associate with. Yet he liked going to the world congresses every summer, listening to the speakers and the philosophical debates, and keeping up with the bluster of the movement and tossing in his own opinions.

The 1989 world congress continued in Richard Butler’s recent theme of trying to recruit younger people. The focus was on skinheads, the young soldiers who would step in to take over from the old men of the movement. Randy, Vicki, and the kids had brought a friend, a visitor from the Deere plant in Iowa, and they all camped at the edge of the Hayden Lake church compound. They stayed in tents and in the back of Randy’s pickup, barbecuing and drinking beer with other families and with some skinheads from Las Vegas whom they’d met.

Later, the skinheads remembered being impressed by the Weavers. Here was a strong, God-fearing group of people who understood Scripture and were as tight as anyone they’d ever seen. But someone complained that Randy had given the young skinheads beer, the kind of thing the Reverend Richard Butler frowned on, especially since his compound was being watched so closely by law enforcement.

Even though the Weavers were having a nice time camping, the congress itself wasn’t as dynamic as those of the past, certainly not like the star-studded gathering of 1986. The widow of Gordon Kahl—a North Dakota tax protester and Posse Comitatus member killed by federal agents after a shoot-out and standoff—was there, but otherwise it was the same old rhetoric by leaders who seemed more and more tired. The pressure from law enforcement finally seemed to be getting to Butler, and people talked among themselves of the need for new leadership. The best part, for Randy, was always seeing friends he’d met at earlier conferences. In fact, toward the end of the gathering, Randy looked up and saw one of the first guys he’d met, the biker Gus Magisono. Gus hadn’t been at the last Aryan Congress, but this year he had an important job. Butler had assigned him as the security officer for the widow Kahl.

“Hey, Gus, how you been?”

“Good, Randy. How about you?”

The informant Ken Fadeley said he’d been too busy to come in 1988. They talked a little and Randy introduced “Gus” to some friends from out of town who’d come for the congress. The biker asked where Kumnick was, and Randy said they’d had a falling out.

“Give us a call sometime, Gus,” Randy said.

He was supposed to be watching some of the Aryan leaders here, not a fringe associate like Weaver, but Ken Fadeley figured he’d keep in touch with him, just to keep an eye on what he and Kumnick might be doing.

“Yeah,” Fadeley said. “If I get a chance, I’ll come up and say hi.”

IN AUGUST, Ken Fadeley drove his Nissan Sentra through Naples, a couple miles north on the old highway, where he pulled off the road and into the driveway of the little red rental house. Fadeley was impressed. The house was nice, the yard well kept, and a new Ford Ranger pickup truck sat in the driveway. Even though Randy had complained about money at the world congress, it looked as if he was doing okay. It was a beautiful summer day, and the mountains behind the house framed it with lush green.

“It’s good to see ya,” Randy said.

“This is a pretty nice place.”

“Thanks.”

As they started for the house, Fadeley was surprised to see Frank Kumnick step outside. He thought there was a rift between Kumnick and Weaver.

“Well, hi Gus,” Kumnick said. “How are you?”

Inside, Fadeley felt some tension between the Weavers and Frank Kumnick. From the kitchen, Vicki Weaver offered to cook Fadeley anything he wanted. She made some chicken soup and they small-talked, Randy and Vicki returning to their favorite subject: Scripture. They had some cookies and coffee and talked about how unimpressed they all were with Butler’s gathering that year. “The same old rhetoric,” Randy said.

Those old guys always repeated themselves, they agreed.

Then, out of nowhere, Kumnick and Randy got into it, arguing about where the Weavers had gotten the money for the new truck and the rental of the little house and the other things they’d been buying. Fadeley thought it might even turn violent.

Randy couldn’t believe it. He was pissed off, and Fadeley backed him up. “It’s nobody’s damned business,” he said.

“Exactly,” Randy said. As the argument heated up, Vicki began crying, curled up in a chair in the living room, saying she was tired of all the rumors.

Finally, Kumnick left. Fadeley walked him out, and they made an appointment to meet at a restaurant in Bonners Ferry later that day. When Fadeley returned to the house and told Randy that he was meeting Kumnick later, Randy said Frank wasn’t trustworthy anymore.

“Frank’s too radical,” Randy said. He said he didn’t want Frank to know what he and “Gus” were talking about. Frank and his wife had been their closest friends in Idaho, Randy said. And now he couldn’t be trusted. “He’s gone off the deep end.”

The Weavers had lost another set of close friends, in fact the oldest friends they had in Boundary.

Before Fadeley left, he testified later, Randy launched into some bizarre speech about how he was being prepared for something by God, being set up to do something big for the white race. And then the children came running inside, saying the dog was about to have puppies, and so Fadeley made his way out, although he and Randy set up another appointment, this time to talk business.

After the August meeting, Fadeley talked with Byerly about where to go next in their investigation of white separatists. They had some fourteen hours of tape on Kumnick, but the only crime they had on him was a sawed-off rifle that Fadeley said Kumnick sold him. Since all the craziness with the kidnapping plot and the talk of Super Glue and stripping federal agents, Kumnick was keeping a low profile.

But something was going on at the Aryan Nations. Federal authorities were aware of the dissatisfaction with Butler’s leadership and knew the legal pressure had driven committed warriors away from the Aryan Nations. In fact, the ATF was becoming more interested in some people just over the border in Montana. Specifically, the bureau wanted to investigate a constitutionalist named David Trochmann and a Ku Klux Klan member named Chuck Howarth, who had settled in Montana in 1987 after getting out of prison on an explosives violation. Richard Butler’s top two lieutenants eventually would leave him to join Howarth, at a church they promised wouldn’t have the swastikas that covered Butler’s compound. “Adolf Hitler is dead and the Third Reich is gone; it’s history,” Howarth said. “All you’ve got now is seventy- and eighty-year-old men sitting around talking about history. It has nothing to do with the movement and problems we face today.”

The Montana leaders knew the movement was destined for bigger and more widely accepted things. Later, the Trochmann family formed the Militia of Montana, the prototype for militia movements around the country.

In 1989, authorities were investigating tips that Trochmann and Howarth might be gunrunning, a violation with which they were never charged. But at that time, it was up to Fadeley to figure out exactly what they might be up to. Randy Weaver had talked about knowing those guys, Fadeley told Byerly, and maybe he might lead the informant to Montana.

On October 11, Randy and Kenneth Fadeley met again at Connies, around 9:00 a.m. After taping the first meeting with Weaver, Fadeley hadn’t worn a wire since. Again, he wasn’t wired, but he made careful notes of the meeting.

They made small talk, had a cup of coffee. Randy asked if Fadeley had been busy.

“Very much so,” Fadeley said. He’d sold all of his “product”—his guns. “How are you surviving?”

“Just that, Gus.” Then Randy said times were tough and that they were moving back up to the mountain because they couldn’t afford rent anymore and that the world was sliding again. In the Soviet Union, for instance, Gorbachev was having trouble, and it looked like the hard-liners might dump him any day, sparking a war with the United States. “It’s all goin’ down the tubes,” Randy said. Fadeley had met with Randy only a few times, but almost every time he heard that the world was goin’ down the tubes.

Fadeley brought up the Montana trip. Maybe at the end of the week, he and Randy could take a little drive over, check in with Mr. Howarth.

Randy said that was fine.

They talked some more about guns, which ones were in highest demand among the arms dealer’s mysterious clients. Fadeley said the biggest sellers were .223s, .308s, and shotguns, especially the shotguns. Twelve-gauge mostly.

Then, according to Fadeley, Randy said he was ready to do business with the gun dealer. He said that he could get his hands on Remington model 870 shotguns—the standard duck hunter’s gun—and that he could saw the barrels off five shotguns a week if there was a market. Randy claimed it was Fadeley who asked him to do business.

They walked out of Connies and stepped behind the restaurant. Randy got into his truck and pulled a gun case from behind the seat. He opened it, pulled out the kind of shotgun they’d been talking about, and pointed to a spot on the barrel.

According to Fadeley, Randy said, “I can cut it off to about here.”

The government informant pointed to the gun and said, “About here.” Or, “About here?” Fadeley insisted later at trial that it was a question.

Weaver said it was an instruction.

Either way, they were set. They made a plan to meet on Thursday, exchange the guns and the money, and drive to Montana to meet Randy’s friends. Randy seemed relieved. “I need to make some money, Gus. Hey, if this works out, maybe I can keep feeding my kids.”

“It’s a struggle, ain’t it?”

Back in the office, Fadeley made his report to Byerly, and they talked about using Randy to get to the new leaders in Montana. As soon as Randy got them to Howarth and Trochmann, Fadeley said, they would be done with him. He was a nobody, certainly not a leader in the movement or a target for law enforcement. But any big criminal investigation is made up of dozens of smaller ones—tiny bits of seemingly unrelated information, intelligence from everywhere, guys rolling over on their buddies—until the whole case suddenly comes together. Randy Weaver had a role in this investigation, getting them to Montana. In 1989, as they prepared the Montana plan, the ATF didn’t even have an active file on Randy Weaver. So that day Byerly typed his name into the computer to see if he had a criminal record or a file elsewhere at ATF. Nothing came up.

TWO DAYS LATER, on October 13, in the ATF office in Spokane, Herb Byerly tapped out the phone number of Randy Weaver’s house and then handed the telephone to Kenneth Fadeley. A woman answered.

“Hey, Vicki, this is Gus. How you doing?”

They talked a little, and then Randy got on the phone. Fadeley said he couldn’t go to Montana like they’d planned because his mother had suffered a stroke. He looked up at Byerly, who’d told him to come up with some excuse because they couldn’t get air support to cover the dangerous trip to Montana that day. They put it off until they could get a plane, and Fadeley had to make up the excuse about his mother. In truth, she had been dead for three years.

“I have to catch a flight down to see her,” Fadeley told Randy. “She’s in real bad shape.” Now they talked about “chain saws”—the code word for guns that Fadeley had picked up at the Aryan Nations the summer before. When they wanted to talk about gun lengths, they substituted the chain saw’s bar length. Fadeley said that if Randy could really produce such short chain saws, he had a buyer.

They made plans to meet at Connies again on October 24. “Uh, maybe you could put something together and bring it with you,” Fadeley said.

They repeated the drill, meeting again at Connies, and driving, this time to City Park, the same place they’d gone that icy day in January 1987, when Kumnick had pulled a gun and a stud finder on the big, affable informant. After going without a wire during the meeting when the gun deal was actually set up, Fadeley wore one for the transaction itself.

Weaver was suspicious again, but Fadeley tried to put him at ease, saying the guys he was dealing with would never cause him problems. “I’ve been in this business far too long to get fucked over now.”

Weaver showed him two shotguns, one pump-action, the other a single shot, both about five and a half inches shorter than the law allows. For the guns to be legal, Randy would have to apply to the government and pay a $200 registration fee. Of course, he had done neither.

Randy said he cut the guns himself, “sitting under a shade tree with a vise and a hacksaw. When I get my workshop set up I can do a better job.”

“That’s good quality,” Fadeley said. “Oh yeah, that’s beautiful. How ‘bout I pay you three hundred for both?”

“I’m going to have to have three hundred on the pump,” Weaver said. The single shot would cost $150. Fadeley promised to bring him the rest of the money later. They transferred the guns and returned to Connies to talk some more. Randy said he needed the money badly because he was having such a tough time feeding his family.

“There’s money to be had in it, you know,” Fadeley promised.

“That’s what the good name of the game is.” As far as the guns, Randy said, “Personally, I hope they end up with a street gang.”

“I got an idea where some go…. It’s just, number one, there’s no need to know.”

“No,” Randy said. “I don’t want to know…. You know what my biggest problem is?” Randy asked.

“Yeah?”

“My biggest problem is going to be running around and picking up here and there and … going out and making buys.”

“Well,” Fadeley said. “That’s why … I want it to be worth, worth your time. You figure four or five a week?”

“Yeah. Or more.”

“Pretty good,” the informant said. “That’s paying for all your running around.”

At the end of the meeting, they talked about the Aryan Nations. “What do you hear from down south a little ways?” Fadeley asked.

“I haven’t heard anything from them,” Randy said.

“I’ve never felt comfortable with them,” Fadeley said.

“I don’t like them,” Randy said. They were back to the same conversation they’d started two years before, when they sat in Randy’s Wagoneer with Frank Kumnick and agreed that “the movement” needed new leadership.

And then the meeting ended. Randy Weaver went home to his family and Kenneth Fadeley drove off to meet Herb Byerly and give him the two sawed-off shotguns he’d just bought for the U.S. government. By the time this case was over, they would be the most costly shotguns in the world.