The Co-Conspirators: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 5

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Speaker 19 A little after 6 a.m. on June 25th, 2009, There was a knock at the door.

Speaker 19 Dennis Mahon looked outside and saw deputies from the Ogle County Sheriff's Office standing on the stoop of his parents' farmhouse. But he said he wasn't coming out unless they had a warrant.

Speaker 19 A deputy held up the paperwork, copies of arrest warrants and search warrants for the property.

Speaker 19 But Dennis still wouldn't open the door.

Speaker 19 Dennis Mahon and his twin brother Daniel were nearly 60 years old, and neither man had a criminal record until that day.

Speaker 19 Their elderly parents were asleep in their beds upstairs. But agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had briefed the deputies that morning before they all set out for the Mahon farm.

Speaker 19 Dennis had once told their confidential informant, quote, as long as I have my gun and my ammunition, my final act will be a total, complete, violent act against the government.

Speaker 19 I'm going to be dying with a gun in my hands.

Speaker 19 He was cordial enough at the door, but as the sound of his footsteps receded, the officers saw the blinds go up in an upstairs window.

Speaker 19 The officers scattered, fearing the brothers had chosen to open fire instead of opening the door.

Speaker 19 But nothing happened.

Speaker 19 For half an hour, they tried making contact with the brothers, but Dennis and Daniel didn't answer the phone.

Speaker 19 They were busy making phone calls of their own.

Speaker 19 Most of their friends failed to answer the phone so early in the morning. But Dennis left a voicemail for Becca Stevens, or at least the woman he thought was Becca Stevens.

Speaker 19 He would soon find out that his friend Becca was an ATF informant whose real name was Rebecca Williams. And he would later claim that he'd long suspected that she wasn't who she said she was.

Speaker 19 But at dawn on the day of his arrest, he called a woman he'd been in love with for years and told her he was considering going down shooting.

Speaker 19 But he didn't.

Speaker 19 At 6:45 a.m., a deputy tried Dennis' cell phone again, this time from a number he wouldn't recognize.

Speaker 19 He picked up and agreed to surrender.

Speaker 19 Officers entered the house and arrested both brothers.

Speaker 19 They were just sitting, calmly, feet away from a loaded AK-47 lying on the table.

Speaker 19 For the next two hours, the brothers sat in a van in their parents' front yard as ATF agents searched the house.

Speaker 19 They didn't know it yet, but ATF agents were searching the homes of their longtime friends Tom Metzger in Indiana and Robert Joes in Missouri.

Speaker 19 Sitting side by side, hands cuffed in their laps in a minivan, the twins discussed their situation. Dennis seemed to regret his choice, saying they should have had a shootout.

Speaker 19 Daniel seemed less ready to die, asking his brother what good it would have done to take out those agents.

Speaker 19 They were offered snacks and drinks. The air conditioning was on.
They took a few bathroom breaks, but mostly they sat and talked to each other as the agent searched the house.

Speaker 19 They speculated about what the agents might find in there. Illegal armor-piercing rounds, pornography, white supremacist literature, guns, and bomb-making supplies.

Speaker 19 They worried about their mother, over whom they'd recently been appointed legal guardians due to her advancing Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 19 And they agreed that they'd stay silent. When Dennis climbed out of the van to to stretch his legs around 9:30, there was a man in a suit standing in his parents' front yard.

Speaker 19 He looked the man up and down and said, You know,

Speaker 19 I think I've seen you before.

Speaker 19 And ATF agent Tristan Moreland, the man Dennis had known up until that moment as a neo-Nazi named Jimmy the Wolf, answered,

Speaker 19 Yes,

Speaker 19 you have.

Speaker 19 I'm Molly Conger, and this

Speaker 19 is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 19 This is the last chapter of Dennis Mahon's life.

Speaker 19 It has to be. It ends with a 74-year-old man who isn't scheduled to get out of federal prison until he's 93.

Speaker 19 He will almost certainly die there.

Speaker 19 And I really didn't intend for this to become a five-part series. That's too many parts.

Speaker 19 Even with the cuts and compromises I've made, there's still so much left to say about the life this man led.

Speaker 19 But we can't let this become the Dennis Mahon show.

Speaker 19 There are too many weird little guys whose stories I've promised to tell you for us to spend any more weeks on Dennis.

Speaker 19 But one thing we keep discovering together on this show is that no weird little guy is an island.

Speaker 19 Their lives intersect and intertwine and overlap.

Speaker 19 They share hate group affiliations, they date the same women, they're suspects in the same crimes, they attend the same cross burnings and subscribe to each other's racist newsletters.

Speaker 19 I found a photo this week of Dennis Mahon's white berets at a Klan rally in Tennessee in 1993, where the headline speaker was past Weird Little Guy subject Barry Black.

Speaker 19 The influence their hate and violence has on the world can be devastating,

Speaker 19 but their worlds are actually pretty small.

Speaker 19 And through the lens of Dennis' life, we've traveled through several decades of hate, meeting side characters like the Tulsa Midtown Boot Boys, a neo-Nazi skinhead band in Oklahoma that was linked to years of racist violence.

Speaker 19 We followed Dennis to Germany, where he stoked the flames of anti-immigrant violence amidst a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Speaker 19 We met Carol Howe, the first ATF informant that Dennis fell in love with.

Speaker 19 And we followed Carol and Dennis to Elohim City, a white separatist compound with blurry connections to bombings and bank robberies.

Speaker 19 A lot of the bit players in Dennis' story will be back because they have whole stories of their own too.

Speaker 19 Like Daniel Roosch, the bassist from the Midtown Boot Boys.

Speaker 19 A few years after we left him in the early 90s, after his stint in prison for racially motivated violence, he illustrated a Nazi comic book that William Luther Pierce wrote for children.

Speaker 19 Or Wolfgang Groger, the German-born neo-Nazi Dennis was trying to visit in Canada when he got deported in 1993.

Speaker 19 A few years before he invited Dennis to Toronto, he was a key player in a hare-brained scheme to overthrow the government of Dominica.

Speaker 19 That plan failed.

Speaker 19 But in a roundabout way, it's why the Nazi message board Stormfront exists.

Speaker 19 The website's founder, Don Black, learned how to use a computer during his prison sentence for attempting to coup the government of a Caribbean nation.

Speaker 19 So I think... Maybe you can understand why I've had so much trouble getting myself out of this rabbit hole.

Speaker 19 Admittedly, I often find that I am completely at the mercy of my curiosity. I have a list of episode topics 10 pages long and Dennis wasn't even on it.

Speaker 19 Back in November, I was reading a book written by Kelvin Pierce, the son of National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce.

Speaker 19 I was just trying to squeeze in a little research where I could for whenever the day comes that I try to tackle that story.

Speaker 19 And I got got fixated on the question of money.

Speaker 19 If you can even remember back nearly two months ago now, this all started with a question of money.

Speaker 19 William Luther Pierce almost certainly paid for his West Virginia compound with stolen cash given to him in 1984 by Robert Matthews.

Speaker 19 But then I wanted to know What happened to the other $4 million

Speaker 19 those Nazis stole out of the back of a Brinkstruck?

Speaker 19 From there, we got to the $300,000 that ended up in the hands of Tom Metzger, the founder of White Aryan Resistance.

Speaker 19 Have you ever read the children's book, If You Give a Moose a Muffin? I think there's one about a mouse and a cookie too, but when I was a kid, I was a moose and muffin girl.

Speaker 19 Basically, the moose asks for a muffin.

Speaker 19 But once he gets the muffin, he realizes he needs jam to go with it, and it's so delicious that when he's done, done, he wants to go to the store to get more muffin ingredients.

Speaker 19 But it's cold outside, so he needs to put on a sweater to go to the store, but when he puts on the sweater, he loses the button and he wants to mend it.

Speaker 19 And before you know it, that one little muffin has turned into an afternoon-long ordeal that has nothing at all to do with muffins.

Speaker 19 And that's kind of where I am right now. Except there's no blackberry jam and there's a lot more hate crimes.

Speaker 19 Because while I was digging digging around into what Tom Metzger's immediate next move was after getting that mountain of cash, it was his 1980s public access TV show.

Speaker 19 And that's where I first found Dennis.

Speaker 19 When we first encountered him, he was a side character in someone else's story.

Speaker 19 He was just one of many men around the country who were trying to air copies of Tom Metzger's show on their own local TV channels.

Speaker 19 I made a passing reference to his story ending with a bomb and a prison sentence, but I didn't realize I'd find all of this in between.

Speaker 19 I figured it would be a quick one-and-done follow-up on the story of that bomb.

Speaker 19 It was a pretty well-publicized case, and maybe I wouldn't even have to read any books or spend a lot of money on court documents to get a good story out of it.

Speaker 19 I have never been more wrong in my life.

Speaker 19 So, after nearly two months on this story, let's finally get to the only bomb anybody ever proved Dennis Mahon made.

Speaker 19 In 2004, a package bomb exploded in the hands of Don Logan, the director of Scottsdale, Arizona's Office of Diversity and Dialogue.

Speaker 19 He and two other city employees were injured. The Mahon brothers were arrested in 2009 and went to trial in 2012.

Speaker 19 The jury found Dennis guilty, but acquitted his twin brother Daniel.

Speaker 19 I'm telling you the ending here at the beginning because this isn't an episode of Law and Order.

Speaker 19 As easy as it would be to tell you a straightforward story of a trial, which is what I set out to do two months ago, I drove myself to the brink of madness instead.

Speaker 19 Because those facts alone, that timeline, raises a really big question,

Speaker 19 what took so long?

Speaker 19 You might think the answer is, well, investigations take time.

Speaker 19 Maybe they didn't know it was him.

Speaker 19 But they did,

Speaker 19 almost immediately.

Speaker 19 A few months before the bombing, Dennis Mahon was unhappy to see that the city of Scottsdale was celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.

Speaker 19 So he called the Office of Diversity and Dialogue to share his feelings with them.

Speaker 19 He called from his own phone, and he introduced himself as Dennis Mahon of the White Aryan Resistance of Arizona.

Speaker 19 He left a rambling racial slur-laden voicemail that ended kind of ominously. Quote,

Speaker 19 Anyway, we've got lots of support. The White Aryan Resistance is growing in Scottsdale.
There are a few white people who are standing up.

Speaker 19 So Dennis Mahon was on investigators' radar pretty quickly.

Speaker 19 And his name was already very familiar to agents from the ATF.

Speaker 19 They'd had their eye on Dennis for nearly 20 years.

Speaker 19 But it still took another year before they began their undercover investigation into the Mahon brothers.

Speaker 19 So at this point, you might be thinking, okay, they've got their suspect. They've got an undercover operation.
But they're going to want to get him dead to rights.

Speaker 19 And maybe it took a long time for the informant to get him to confess on tape. Another reasonable assumption, but you'd be wrong again.

Speaker 19 In January of 2005, nearly a year after the bombing, the Mahon brothers were living in a trailer park in Catoosa, Oklahoma.

Speaker 19 The ATF arranged for their informant, Rebecca Williams, to move in a few trailers down and try to befriend them.

Speaker 19 Within hours of this beautiful blonde new neighbor's arrival on a Wednesday afternoon, the brothers were drinking in her trailer, with ATF agents listening in.

Speaker 19 In their very first meeting, Dennis boasted about his long history of bombings.

Speaker 19 Mid-drinks, he ran back to his own trailer to get his photo album because he was eager to show his new friend Rebecca pictures of him in his clan robes.

Speaker 19 By the time the weekend rolled around, they were all drunk on Everclear. and the brothers were regaling her with stories of bombings and drive-by shootings.

Speaker 19 Daniel, the quieter brother, explained that when he blew up people's cars, it wasn't out of anger. It was a sense of duty.

Speaker 19 Barely a week into their budding friendship, Rebecca told Dennis a made-up story about a child molester.

Speaker 19 She said there was a man she knew who was molesting a young relative of hers and she wanted to hurt him. She was thinking of using a mailbomb.

Speaker 19 Dennis responded by describing what kind of bomb a person might make in such a scenario. And the bomb he described was identical to the one that had blown up in Scottsdale.

Speaker 19 In a conversation that took place inside her trailer, captured on audio and video recording, live streamed to agents from the ATF,

Speaker 19 he said that he had successfully made such a bomb and that it blew the fingers off the diversity officer in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Speaker 19 Now, he's probably drunk. He usually is.

Speaker 19 And he says things he shouldn't say when he's drunk. And he backtracks pretty quickly, saying, actually, he didn't build that bomb.
It was the Scottsdale Police Department who did that.

Speaker 19 But he'd taught them how to do it.

Speaker 19 He would maintain for years that it was, in fact, disgruntled white police officers in Scottsdale who built the bomb.

Speaker 19 The ATF did investigate those leads. Several employees of the Scottsdale Police Department were polygraphed, their phones were tapped, they were investigated and cleared.

Speaker 19 But that was the story Dennis stuck with for a long time.

Speaker 19 But still,

Speaker 19 here he is on tape, just days into this undercover operation, linking himself to that bomb.

Speaker 19 Within weeks, Dennis was taking Rebecca to the gun show to buy the parts he'd need to teach her how to build a bomb.

Speaker 19 Over and over

Speaker 19 and over again, for years,

Speaker 19 Dennis Mahon makes incriminating statements on tape to a federal informant.

Speaker 19 He admits to having machine guns and illegal silencers. He teaches her how to make a letter bomb that will only injure and not kill its recipient.
They discuss the Scottsdale bomb often.

Speaker 19 After she moves to Arizona, he asks her to mail him news clippings about the ongoing investigation.

Speaker 19 A year into their friendship, she sent him a news story where Don Logan, the victim of that bombing, was interviewed.

Speaker 19 Afterwards, he called her to talk about it, and he's clearly in a rage to see that his victim is still carrying on the work of the diversity office.

Speaker 19 He called Logan a, quote, very arrogant bastard who just might get what's coming to him again.

Speaker 19 And he said, quote, I just wanted to teach the motherfucker a lesson the first time, and there will be no lesson to learn a second time.

Speaker 19 And it was still another three years after that phone call before cops showed up on his front porch.

Speaker 19 What could they possibly have been waiting for?

Speaker 19 They had enough evidence to arrest him on a... wide variety of federal charges and they clearly planned to because they kept pouring resources into the investigation.

Speaker 19 But they waited four

Speaker 19 years.

Speaker 19 I think the answer, though, is pretty simple.

Speaker 19 They had enough evidence to arrest Dennis,

Speaker 19 but they didn't just want Dennis.

Speaker 19 In last week's story, we flirted a little bit with conspiracy theory.

Speaker 19 Carol Howe provided information to the ATF in 1994 that Dennis Mahon was talking about blowing up a federal building. A few months later, someone else actually did blow up that federal building.

Speaker 19 But there was never anything substantial that actually connected Dennis to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Speaker 19 There are a lot of unanswered questions.

Speaker 19 Some of which are aggravated by Dennis' own habit of getting drunk and bragging about having been involved.

Speaker 19 But as far as the official record goes, the only connection between Dennis Mahon and Timothy McVeigh is that they possibly once met at a gun show.

Speaker 19 This week, though, we aren't talking about a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 19 We're talking about conspiracy in the legal sense.

Speaker 19 In 2012, a federal jury found Dennis Mahon guilty of three things.

Speaker 19 Distribution of information about explosives, malicious damage of a building by means of explosives, and conspiracy to damage buildings and property by means of explosives.

Speaker 19 That's a lot of words to say he talked about making a bomb, planned to build a bomb, and set off a bomb.

Speaker 19 But the conspiracy charge is what I want to talk about.

Speaker 19 A criminal conspiracy is just an agreement between two or more people to do something illegal.

Speaker 19 The conspirators discuss an illegal act, they intend to commit this illegal act,

Speaker 19 and at least one of them takes some kind of step to carry the plan out.

Speaker 19 It's a little bit more complicated than that, but this isn't a criminal law class, so let's not get bogged down.

Speaker 19 The thing to understand here is that a conspiracy requires more than one person.

Speaker 19 In this case, the government did indict Dennis' twin brother Daniel on a single count of of conspiracy. But the jury found him not guilty.

Speaker 19 Two people is enough for a conspiracy. And these were the only two people who got charged in this one.

Speaker 19 But the ATF's theory of the case involved a much wider cast of characters. People all over the country.

Speaker 19 Halfway through this investigation, Agent Moreland filed an application for a wiretap.

Speaker 19 In it, he reveals who he thinks might be involved.

Speaker 19 An heir to a banking fortune who is locked in a legal battle over his family's charitable foundation.

Speaker 19 A pair of Nazi brothers who did time in the 80s for a foiled plot to blow up an elementary school in Ohio.

Speaker 19 A Christian identity preacher hiding machine guns and precious metals in caves on his compound in the Ozarks.

Speaker 19 An infamous white nationalist leader. And a wealthy farmer from Illinois who once got his teeth knocked out by Geraldo Rivera at a Klan rally.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 3 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 7 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 9 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 10 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 14 Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com.

Speaker 6 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

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Speaker 19 We should start with the bomb.

Speaker 19 At the end of last week's episode, Dennis was at Aryan Fest in Phoenix, Arizona. It was the end of January 2004.

Speaker 19 Dennis was 53 years old and claimed to be retired from the movement.

Speaker 19 He spent the weekend listening to white power bands and speeches from movement leaders like his friend Tom Metzker, Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, and Billy Roper.

Speaker 19 And he got really,

Speaker 19 really drunk.

Speaker 19 A reporter from the Phoenix New Times overheard him bragging to some young neo-Nazis about having been involved with Timothy McVeigh.

Speaker 19 When the article came out a few weeks later, Dennis left the reporter several very drunk voicemails trying to explain to her that he had actually been cleared in the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, and he wanted her to make that clear in the article.

Speaker 19 Tom Metzger, whose speech at Arianfest included what you might interpret as incitement to carry out bombings, also responded to the article, emailing the reporter, quote,

Speaker 19 Amusing article.

Speaker 19 If only you knew.

Speaker 19 But you will.

Speaker 19 Years later, a man named Alan was arrested for defrauding buyers on eBay.

Speaker 19 Alan wasn't at Aryan Fest. He's not involved in any of this.
I think he's just a normal guy who did a pretty staggering amount of wire fraud.

Speaker 19 But in 2009, he was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. Dennis Mahon was there too.

Speaker 19 He'd just been arrested and he was awaiting extradition to Arizona to be tried for the bombing.

Speaker 19 And for a week in July 2009,

Speaker 19 Dennis and Alan shared a cell.

Speaker 19 During their time together, Alan asked Dennis what he was in for, and Dennis refused to say.

Speaker 19 This prompted Alan to speculate that, if you won't say, it must be pedophilia.

Speaker 19 And that apparently made Dennis angry enough to tell the truth.

Speaker 19 He said he was in for making bombs, specifically that he was the Scottsdale bomber.

Speaker 19 I think it's fair to say that you always have to take the story of a jailhouse informant with a grain of salt.

Speaker 19 Alan was definitely hoping to exchange this information for some consideration in his own case, and ultimately he did.

Speaker 19 But from the time he claims he had these conversations with Dennis, until he was interviewed by federal agents about it,

Speaker 19 He was in SEG.

Speaker 19 He wasn't involved in the movement. He had no connection to Scottsdale, Arizona.
I can't promise you that everything he said is true,

Speaker 19 but I do think it's very safe to say that everything he told those agents really was something Dennis told him,

Speaker 19 because there's just no other way he could have produced any of these details.

Speaker 19 Some of the things Dennis told Alan are not true.

Speaker 19 But they are consistent with the kinds of lies Dennis is known to tell.

Speaker 19 He boasted about his friendship with Timothy McVay and even hinted that he had been one of the John Does that witnesses saw with McVeigh on the morning of the bombing.

Speaker 19 He claimed to have opened fire on civilians during the Miami riots in 1980.

Speaker 19 And we've talked about both of those claims in previous episodes. These are lies that have come up before, and I don't think either of those things are true.

Speaker 19 But they are things that Dennis sometimes wants you to think are true.

Speaker 19 He also told Alan that he'd been on the phone phone with Tom Metzger on the morning he was arrested, and that it had been Tom Metzger who convinced him to surrender, telling him he didn't need to go down shooting, that he'd get him out of this.

Speaker 19 And that may be true.

Speaker 19 Metzger certainly would not have wanted to end up charged in connection with the deaths of a bunch of federal agents.

Speaker 19 The other revelations from Alan are...

Speaker 19 intriguing.

Speaker 19 By his account, Dennis decided to build that bomb in February of 2004 because he'd recently met a man that he wanted to impress.

Speaker 19 Alan couldn't remember anyone's names, but he says shortly before the bombing, Dennis met a man from Europe who had recently been released from a prison in the UK for blowing up a building.

Speaker 19 It struck me as completely extraneous at first, but this next detail is the most important one.

Speaker 19 He mentions that the man was Protestant.

Speaker 19 This is all very vague. This sounds like it could be nothing.
But hear me out because I'm going to do a little wild speculation based in half a day of wasted research.

Speaker 19 Let's go back to Arianfest 2004 for a second.

Speaker 19 It takes a lot of work to pull off a Nazi picnic, so there were several groups involved in planning the event.

Speaker 19 It was organized mainly by a group called Volksfront, but that's not important right now.

Speaker 19 A lot of the on-the-ground logistics, camping, food, communication, were handled by women, obviously.

Speaker 19 Specifically, it was a group called Women for Aryan Unity.

Speaker 19 The group's newsletter indicates that they had active chapters in several U.S. cities and in Dublin.

Speaker 19 But I didn't need their newsletter to tell me that that the Women for Aryan Unity probably know some Ulster loyalists.

Speaker 19 Victoria Cahill was living in Colorado by the time she was responsible for the Women for Aryan Unity's newsletter. But she is from Dublin.

Speaker 19 She's also the niece of an infamous Irish crime boss named Martin Cahill.

Speaker 19 When Martin Cahill was murdered in 1994, The IRA issued a press release claiming responsibility.

Speaker 19 It was believed that Cahill's criminal organization had been trafficking guns for the Ulster Volunteer Force, specifically for the unit that had recently murdered an IRA member who prevented a loyalist bombing attack at a Dublin pub.

Speaker 19 So, no, it's not hard to believe someone at Aryan Fest would invite an Ulsterman to the party.

Speaker 19 In the few digital scraps remaining of the defunct online message boards set up for Aryan Fest 2004 attendees, several organizers from Women for Aryan Unity make reference to their Irish guests, but I haven't been able to put any names to it.

Speaker 19 There are, honestly, quite a few possibilities here, because after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, over 400 prisoners from both sides of the Troubles were released early from prison, and the last batch of those releases took place in 2000.

Speaker 19 And Alan told the agents from the ATF that Dennis built that bomb because he wanted to impress a Protestant from the UK who went to prison for blowing up a building.

Speaker 19 And that would be a very strange thing for a man who didn't know any of that to pull out of thin air.

Speaker 19 He also claimed Dennis told him after the bombing, Tom Metzger had arranged for the brothers to stay with a man named Harrington in Tulsa.

Speaker 19 This one took me a minute to sort out. because the ATF report spells Harrington with an A,

Speaker 19 not an E.

Speaker 19 But I believe this has to be Clifford Harrington, the founder and former chairman of the National Socialist Movement.

Speaker 19 He had stepped down as chairman a few years earlier and was living in Tulsa at the time.

Speaker 19 Alan's memory is fuzzy here, but he said something about how maybe this Harrington fellow also needed Dennis' help. because of his own trouble with the law.
And that doesn't make much sense.

Speaker 19 How can two men hide each other from the law?

Speaker 19 But I think I can explain this.

Speaker 19 I think Alan is blending together two different similar stories.

Speaker 19 Because there are rumors in the weirder corners of the white nationalist world that Cliff Harrington crashed at Dennis's house for a while in the mid-90s after he got caught with an underage girl in Minnesota.

Speaker 19 So maybe Harrington was just repaying the favor 10 years later by letting Dennis stay at his house after the bombing.

Speaker 19 Harrington's wife, Andrea, has denied any of this ever happened, but she was also a priestess with the Nazi cult Joy of Satan Ministries, and she spent many years denying a lot of allegations after it came out that the Nazi's wife was running a satanic cult out of the same P.O.

Speaker 19 box he used for National Socialist Movement business.

Speaker 19 She died in 2020 after falling and hitting her head, so we can't ask her about any of that.

Speaker 19 During that week in 2009 that Dennis and Alan shared a cell, Dennis talked a lot.

Speaker 19 He talked a lot about a lot of people he knew and a lot of things that he'd done.

Speaker 19 He talked about his friend Steve Waddell, a man who'd lived down the street from the Mahon brothers in Tulsa in the 90s.

Speaker 19 And he told Alan that he's worried his friend John McLaughlin might be a federal informant.

Speaker 19 He talked a lot about Tom Metzger.

Speaker 19 He was so sure that Metzger was already hard at work organizing a big, expensive legal defense team for him.

Speaker 19 After all,

Speaker 19 he'd promised on the morning of the arrest, we'll get you out of this.

Speaker 19 But that never happened.

Speaker 19 Like I said, maybe nothing Dennis told Alan in that jail cell in Chicago five years after the bombing means anything at all.

Speaker 19 But whether he felt moved to impress an aging monarchist from Ireland or not, it was just two weeks after Ering infested 2004 that he really recommitted himself to violence.

Speaker 19 On February 13th, 2004, Dennis Mahon wrote out his last will and testament.

Speaker 19 He planned to leave $5,000 to Tom Metzger and everything else would go to his twin brother Daniel.

Speaker 19 The document was signed by Daniel as his witness, and it reads in part,

Speaker 19 I request to be buried next to Robert J. Matthews' ashes on his widow Matthews' property in Medelline Falls, Washington.

Speaker 19 I have fought the evil, greedy, race and culture-destroying politicians, the corporate leaders, the bankers, and the powerful Jews since I was 28 years old after studying the real history of our race.

Speaker 19 At the bottom, he signs off by writing, quote, in memory of Robert Matthews and Tim McVeigh,

Speaker 19 just above his own signature.

Speaker 19 He sent the document to his father in Illinois by certified mail. Postal Service records indicate he mailed it on February 21st, the same day the bomb was discovered.

Speaker 19 Now, I've never built a bomb, obviously. I don't even know how to change a car battery.
I certainly wouldn't trust myself with a soldering iron and black powder.

Speaker 19 But I've read enough about bombers to know that it's not uncommon for a bomber to blow himself up by accident.

Speaker 19 So maybe if I were tinkering with a bomb, I would get my will sorted out beforehand, just in case.

Speaker 19 But that's not actually the timeline we have here.

Speaker 19 He wasn't concerned he would die trying to make the bomb. He assumed the cops would link him to the bomb immediately after the explosion.

Speaker 19 And he was getting his affairs in order because he planned to die in a shootout with the ATF in the very near future.

Speaker 19 He even asked to be laid to rest alongside Robert Matthews, the Nazi who died in a shootout with the FBI in 1984.

Speaker 19 On February 21st, he mails his will,

Speaker 19 and he made a lot of phone calls.

Speaker 19 No one can say for certain exactly how the bomb ended up in the Scottsdale Public Library. But the most logical answer is that Dennis put it there himself.

Speaker 19 He'd said several times over the years to both informants and reporters that it was his practice to hand deliver his package bombs in disguise.

Speaker 19 The package was located at about 10.30 a.m.

Speaker 19 And Dennis' phone records show that he was on the phone most of that day, starting at 6 a.m.

Speaker 19 But he didn't make any calls between 9.30 a.m. and 11.30 a.m.,

Speaker 19 which is the perfect window of time for him to make the 30-minute round-trip drive to Scottsdale Civic Center and leave the package on the desk in the library where it was found.

Speaker 19 And who did Dennis Mahon call on the morning he planted that bomb?

Speaker 19 Quite a few people, as it turns out.

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Speaker 19 The day the bomb was planted, Dennis Mahon got up early.

Speaker 19 He placed his first call of the day at 6 a.m. to Robert Joes.

Speaker 19 Joes is a curious character, and we may have to revisit him. He still lives on his 300-acre compound in Missouri.

Speaker 19 Over the course of the investigation into the bombing, Dennis told the ATF informant, Rebecca, a lot about his friend Robert Joes.

Speaker 19 They'd known each other for quite a long time.

Speaker 19 When Joes went to prison in the mid-90s, the Mahon brothers maintained his property for him.

Speaker 19 He's a bit of a sovereign citizen type.

Speaker 19 In the late 80s, he was charged with interfering with the courts because he wouldn't stop filing nonsense motions in cases he wasn't involved in.

Speaker 19 But the cops couldn't manage to get their hands on him.

Speaker 19 In 1994, he was finally detained by a state trooper during a traffic stop and held on that old warrant.

Speaker 19 Shortly after his arrest, a man who'd been living on Joseph's compound took revenge on that trooper, shooting him in the chest while he was sitting at his own kitchen table.

Speaker 19 The trooper survived, but the shooter, a man named Timothy Coombs, remains on Missouri's most wanted list to this day.

Speaker 19 As a convicted felon, Robert Joes is not supposed to have any guns at all. But according to Dennis, the caves that dot the landscape of his compound are full of stockpiled weapons.

Speaker 19 Those caves, he told Rebecca, were where he and his brother would go if they really started to feel any heat from the feds.

Speaker 19 During the investigation into the Scottsdale bombing, the informant visited Joes on his Missouri compound three times, twice in the company of an undercover agent.

Speaker 19 With the Mahon brothers vouching for Rebecca and Rebecca vouching for her friend, Jimmy the Wolf, Joes welcomed the informant and the agent onto his property.

Speaker 19 They discussed bomb-making and purchasing illegal weapons.

Speaker 19 Over the course of those three visits, Joes got very comfortable discussing bomb-making and illegal guns with his new friends.

Speaker 19 Agent Moreland, posing as Jimmy the Wolf, had a a fairly explicit conversation with Joes about the fact that he understood that he was not legally allowed to own any guns and that he did, in fact, own guns, guns that were in the room with them as they had this conversation.

Speaker 19 And while the ATF was never able to scrape together enough proof to charge Joes as a co-conspirator in the bombing, He was arrested the same day as the Mahon twins and charged with being a felon in possession of guns and explosives, both of which were found in abundance on his property.

Speaker 19 In his own criminal case, he tried to downplay his connection to the Mahons, claiming that he had no real knowledge at all of what the brothers were into.

Speaker 19 Admitted into evidence in his case, though, was a videotape the ATF found at Tom Metzger's house.

Speaker 19 In 1993, Dennis Mahon conducted paramilitary training drills for members of White Aryan Resistance on Joes' property.

Speaker 19 By the time the twins went to trial in 2012, Jose was already two years into his seven-year sentence.

Speaker 19 I'm not sure what I thought I would learn by paying $30 to read the transcripts from his trial. I didn't get much of substance out of it.

Speaker 19 But I couldn't live with myself if I didn't tell you that he tried to attend his own trial in his underwear.

Speaker 19 He claimed that his religious beliefs require him to wear clothing that complies only with God's law, which means that he can only wear clothing that has fringe down the sides and a violet ribbon around the border.

Speaker 19 Now, me personally, I'd rather show up in court in my underwear than unpack the strange appropriation of misinterpreted Jewish law by the world's weirdest anti-Semites.

Speaker 19 In the end, The jail wouldn't let him go to court in his underpants, so he showed up to the first day of his trial in his jail uniform.

Speaker 19 Apparently by the second day, someone had provided him with satisfactorily fringed garments, but there aren't any pictures.

Speaker 19 He was released from prison in 2015 and seems to have stayed out of any criminal trouble since then, but it looks like he's being sued by his 94-year-old mother over the title to that land.

Speaker 19 Robert Joes wasn't called to testify in the Mahans trial, and I don't know if he's had a chance chance to read any of those documents since he got out of prison in 2015.

Speaker 19 He may have no idea that before his arrest in 2009, Dennis had started to talk pretty seriously about putting a bullet in Robert Joe's and taking the $30,000 worth of silver he believed was hidden in the caves.

Speaker 19 Back to the morning the bomb was planted in 2004.

Speaker 19 After he got off the phone with Joes, Dennis spoke briefly with his brother, who was finishing an overnight shift at the Phoenix airport.

Speaker 19 And then he made his second phone call of the morning, and he called Charles Koontz.

Speaker 19 Koontz is an interesting element in this story because outside of this relationship, I can't find anything that connects him to the white power movement.

Speaker 19 No arrests, no group affiliations, no racist letters to the editor of his local paper.

Speaker 19 Aside from the filings in this case, the only other place his name really exists is in the extensive litigation regarding his seat on the board of the Gilbert and Martha Hitchcock Foundation, a charitable foundation in Nebraska that was run for decades by his father, Denman Koontz Jr.,

Speaker 19 the great-grandson of the founder of the First National Bank of Omaha.

Speaker 19 But it seems Charles Koontz had been a quiet but enthusiastic supporter of white supremacist terror for many years.

Speaker 19 He sent the Mahon brothers money, he visited them occasionally, he called often, and he once gave them a car.

Speaker 19 By the time Dennis' conversations were being recorded by a federal informant, though, the money they'd been enjoying for years seemed to be drying up a little.

Speaker 19 After his father's death in 2005, Koontz lost his seat on the board of the Hitchcock Foundation.

Speaker 19 Factions formed within the family, and they all spent years suing each other, which probably took up a lot of his time and money.

Speaker 19 Over the years between 2005 and 2009, Dennis would often tell Rebecca that he was concerned Koontz may be an informant, which is a little funny because we only know he said that because he was sharing those fears with the actual informant.

Speaker 19 After Koontz visited Dennis one day in 2005, he called Rebecca to complain that Koontz wouldn't stop asking if they could shoot some of Dennis's guns together.

Speaker 19 And it was very suspicious how insistent he was that he wanted to try shooting with a silencer, something that would be a federal crime for Dennis to own.

Speaker 19 Later that year, he told Rebecca that Koontz had been asking him a lot of questions about various bombings he'd carried out in the past.

Speaker 19 He was trying to get specific details about which abortion clinic it was that he bombed in the 80s. And he really wanted to talk about Scottsdale.

Speaker 19 And honestly,

Speaker 19 that sounds like snitch behavior. That's exactly the kind of conversation an informant might try to have with you.

Speaker 19 But the ATF put his name in their wiretap affidavit as a suspect, so I don't think he was their informant.

Speaker 19 I guess we have to leave open the possibility that he was informing for another agency, or maybe he was just planning to do some freelance snitching down the line.

Speaker 19 More likely, though, I think he just liked living vicariously through the domestic terrorists he'd been funding for years.

Speaker 19 He sent them money, and in return, he got to feel like he was part of something exciting.

Speaker 19 By 2007, he was only sending the brothers a few hundred dollars every couple of months.

Speaker 19 Around the same time that he started talking about killing Robert Joes and stealing his guns and silver, Dennis was complaining to Rebecca that Koontz had millions in the bank and he was holding out on him.

Speaker 19 He said he was thinking about asking Koontz for $100,000 so he could do something big.

Speaker 19 And if Koontz refused, maybe he'd take him out to Joes' compound and quote, cut his balls off with a dull knife.

Speaker 19 Koontz was never called to testify in the trial, and as far as I can tell, he's never spoken publicly about any of this.

Speaker 19 I couldn't even find in the documentation for the case any transcripts of intercepted calls between Dennis and Koontz.

Speaker 19 They may be there, there are thousands of documents, but I didn't see them.

Speaker 19 So most of what I know about their relationship comes from transcripts of calls where Dennis gets off the phone with Kuntz and then calls Rebecca and describes it to her.

Speaker 19 But based on the information I do have, it seems like in the months before Dennis was finally arrested, his longtime benefactor really did have his best interests at heart.

Speaker 19 He was incredibly suspicious of Rebecca.

Speaker 19 For the most part, Dennis believed Rebecca when she said she'd moved out to Arizona and gotten involved in border militia-type activity.

Speaker 19 The ATF staged a whole photo shoot out in the deserts with agents dressed up as right-wing extremists posing with guns and Nazi flags. She mailed Dennis a photo from that outing.

Speaker 19 She's sort of leaning up against a blue pickup truck, and the edge of a Nazi flag is visible behind her.

Speaker 19 She's wearing a camo print bucket hat and a white bikini top.

Speaker 19 And then there, nestled between her breasts, there's a hand grenade.

Speaker 19 And Dennis apparently really,

Speaker 19 really enjoyed these pictures, and that may be why he chose to believe her.

Speaker 19 But Koontz just wasn't buying it.

Speaker 19 Just two months before the ATF showed up to arrest Dennis, Koontz called him to say that he'd been searching for any news stories in Arizona about the kinds of things Rebecca claimed she'd been doing for the movement.

Speaker 19 Right? She'd been telling Dennis about various actions she and her cell were carrying out, and Koontz was looking to see if there was any news about any of this. And he couldn't find anything.

Speaker 19 And Dennis was irate at this implication. He told Koontz that Rebecca had done more for the movement than Koontz ever had.

Speaker 19 And then he reminded Koons that Dennis was someone who knew what he was talking about, shouting, you don't know how many pipe bombs I lit off.

Speaker 19 You don't know how many transformers I've destroyed and put people out of power in the early 80s from 82 to 87 before I got outed.

Speaker 19 And again, here's Dennis making some oddly specific claims about things he'd done in the past.

Speaker 19 Last week, I tried and failed to find any news stories about a 500-pound ammonium nitrate bomb blowing up a truck in Michigan in the 80s, which is a very specific claim that he made to Carol Howe.

Speaker 19 And here he is now talking about carrying out a grid attack in the 80s.

Speaker 19 I wish he'd be a little more specific about what region and maybe exactly which year,

Speaker 19 because I feel like I could solve this if he just gave me a few more clues.

Speaker 19 One possibility is in 1981, three power substations in Martin and St. Lucie counties were attacked in the same night using a combination of rifle fire and explosives.

Speaker 19 The method that Dennis would later drunkenly describe to Rebecca.

Speaker 19 The attacks caused about a million dollars worth of damage, but the lights actually only went out for about an hour.

Speaker 19 I couldn't find any follow-up stories about the incident being solved, and Dennis did live in South Florida at the time, so

Speaker 19 I don't know.

Speaker 19 In another conversation with Rebecca, he's starting to get very paranoid that his past might catch up with him, and he's sure that the feds are closing in, quote,

Speaker 19 for something that happened in 1986,

Speaker 19 1985.

Speaker 19 Quite a few things happened in those two years around the country.

Speaker 19 A lot of bombs went off.

Speaker 19 End quote.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I don't know about that one. I mean some bombs definitely did go off in 85 and 86.

Speaker 19 In 1986 there was a series of bombings in Idaho carried out by members of the Aryan nations, but there were arrests made in those cases.

Speaker 19 1986 is also the year I found for an unsolved pipe bomb at a Jewish community center in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a bomb at a Detroit abortion clinic, and an arson at a Planned Parenthood in Kalamazoo.

Speaker 19 I don't think any of those were ever solved, but again,

Speaker 19 it's hard to say.

Speaker 19 So if you know a retired ATF agent with loose lips, for the love of God, ask them to just give me a hint.

Speaker 19 Just give me a hint, because I lost days trying to figure out every unsolved bombing in the span of 15 years.

Speaker 19 And I just can't figure out which bombs Dennis is trying to take credit for in that angry phone call with his secret benefactor.

Speaker 19 But

Speaker 19 back to Dennis' phone calls on the morning he planted this bomb.

Speaker 19 So far he's called Robert Joes, his brother, and Charles Koontz.

Speaker 19 He talks to his brother again briefly. And then he received a call from someone using a calling card with an Atlanta area code.
The call lasted less than a minute. He may not have even picked up.

Speaker 19 But the same number called again two more times, five days later, just a few hours after the bomb actually went off.

Speaker 19 And both of those calls also lasted just a few seconds.

Speaker 19 I can't explain that, and there's nothing offered in the record.

Speaker 19 He missed two more calls from his brother while he was on the phone for his longest call that morning. He spent half an hour on the phone with Edward Gerhardt.

Speaker 19 And this was another surprise. I didn't expect to see them here.

Speaker 19 Edward and his brother John started a short-lived Nazi group called the American White Nationalist Party in 1972.

Speaker 19 In 1974, they were sentenced to a short stay at the state reformatory for shooting out the windows of a state education official and then calling to let him know that it had only been a warning from the Klan.

Speaker 19 A 1976 issue of The Ohio National Socialist includes a brief mention that Ohio leaders of the National Socialist movement had met with Ed and John Gerhard of the American White Nationalist Party to discuss how their Nazi groups might present a unified front against forced busing in Columbus.

Speaker 19 One of the representatives at that meeting was a young James Mason, just a few years before he would start writing the essays that would eventually become Siege,

Speaker 19 every Nazi terrorist's favorite book.

Speaker 19 And as for that united front against desegregation in Ohio, the Gerhardt brothers would spend a few years in federal prison, after they were arrested in 1979, for plotting to blow up Old Orchard Elementary School in Columbus.

Speaker 19 The 11-year-old daughter of the federal judge who'd ordered Columbus schools to begin busing was a student there.

Speaker 19 John Gerhardt would go on to get arrested again in 1992 for abduction.

Speaker 19 During the decade he spent in an Ohio prison, he sued the state prison system for infringing on his free exercise of religion.

Speaker 19 The religion in question was the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which sounds like it might be normal Christianity, but it's not.

Speaker 19 It is the particular flavor of Christian identity that was popularized by Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.

Speaker 19 I can't find much about what Edward Gerhardt got up to after he got out of prison in 1983. He doesn't seem to exist anywhere that I could find, although admittedly I ran out of time to look.

Speaker 19 But based on my cursory search, If I didn't know that he'd been on the phone with a bomber on the morning of a bombing in 2004, I might have assumed that he just didn't think about bombs at all anymore.

Speaker 19 But given that I do know that he was on the phone with Dennis the morning of the bombing, I gotta say I don't think they were talking about the weather.

Speaker 19 And just before Dennis Mahon's phone goes quiet for that two-hour window, which is probably when he dropped off the bomb, he made one last phone call.

Speaker 19 He called Tom Metzger, and they spoke for seven minutes.

Speaker 19 Dennis must have been very confused later that day.

Speaker 19 He didn't see anything in the news about a bomb.

Speaker 19 He planted that bomb on February 21st.

Speaker 19 Then he went home and he waited.

Speaker 19 What he didn't know is that he'd delivered it to the wrong address.

Speaker 19 It's not entirely clear how this mistake happened, but he wrote down on the box the address of the library, not the address of the diversity office.

Speaker 19 And so when the time came to deliver it, he took the box to the address written on the box.

Speaker 19 It took another five days before that package found its way into Don Logan's hands, detonating around 1 p.m. on February 26th.

Speaker 19 And when the explosion finally hit the national news that evening, Charles Kuntz started blowing up Dennis' phone.

Speaker 19 He called him several times that evening, right around the time it would have hit the 5 o'clock news.

Speaker 19 But it doesn't look like Dennis ever picked up.

Speaker 19 He was too busy calling Tom Metzger repeatedly and having his calls ignored.

Speaker 19 A lot of the documents related to this wiretap are kind of a riddle to me.

Speaker 19 They raise a lot more questions than they answer. When Agent Moreland applied for those wiretaps, he was exploring a theory of this case that included this large cast of co-conspirators.

Speaker 19 But by the time the case got to trial,

Speaker 19 that wasn't the theory anymore. That wasn't what was pursued by the prosecutor.
And so almost none of those names ever come up in any other documents related to the case.

Speaker 19 And no evidence was presented at trial to explain these flurries of telephone activity on dates that were significant in the bombing case.

Speaker 19 The day the bomb was planted, the day the bomb went off, the day the sheriff showed up with a warrant for his DNA.

Speaker 19 Now, DNA ended up being useless in this case. Dennis was careful.
He always wore gloves and he taught Rebecca not to lick stamps.

Speaker 19 But a year before the arrests, a warrant was served to swab both brothers for DNA samples.

Speaker 19 And after that sample was taken, Dennis called Tom Metzger.

Speaker 19 And on a line he surely did not know was tapped. he said over and over again, I'll never betray you, Tom.
I'll never betray you. I'll never implicate you.

Speaker 19 And he doesn't say for what?

Speaker 19 And Tom Metzger doesn't ask.

Speaker 19 He doesn't ask Dennis what he means. He doesn't say implicate me in what.

Speaker 19 He responds, I know you won't.

Speaker 19 Some of the calls to Joes and Metzger were allowed into evidence at trial, but Charles Koontz and Edward Gerhardt were nowhere to be found.

Speaker 19 The wiretap documentation lists even more names we never really see again.

Speaker 19 Dennis received several calls the week of the bombing from Tina Higgins, the founder of a hate group called Central New York White Pride.

Speaker 19 Agent Moreland lists the brother's old neighbor, Steve Waddell, as a target of the investigation. along with another name I can't quite place, Stephen Sawyer.

Speaker 19 When Agent Moreland spoke to Daniel Mahon on the morning of the arrest, he told him that agents were at Tom Metzger's house at that very moment.

Speaker 19 And he warned Daniel that even more of his friends would be getting the same treatment in the near future.

Speaker 19 A transcription of his body camera during this encounter shows Moreland telling Daniel that he's just trying to be straight with him, telling him Mr.

Speaker 19 Koontz, the Gerhart brothers, Tina Higgins, all of them, all this stuff's going on all over the country right now. McLaughlin down in Springfield, Sawyer, Waddell.

Speaker 19 It goes on and on.

Speaker 19 And Daniel laughs and says they'll have to get Sawyer to sober up if they want to get anything out of him.

Speaker 19 As far as I can tell, none of those other people got raided that day.

Speaker 19 If they did, they never said anything.

Speaker 19 John McLaughlin, a man who was exchanging calls with Dennis on a weekly basis for years during the course of this investigation, was never mentioned in connection with the case outside of these wiretap documents.

Speaker 19 Maybe Dennis was onto something when he told his cellmate that McLaughlin may have been an informant.

Speaker 19 He died in 2017, so we can't ask him if there's a better explanation for this.

Speaker 19 But in 1995, the ATF recovered a cache of illegal weapons that he'd been stockpiling for the race war.

Speaker 19 But he wasn't charged federally. The ATF let the state of Illinois handle the case and a county judge gave him community service.

Speaker 19 Maybe there's an explanation, but I don't have it.

Speaker 19 In 1992, McLaughlin and Geraldo Rivera were both arrested after they got into a fistfight at a Klan rally in Janesville, Wisconsin. Rivera says the man got in his face and called him a racial slur.

Speaker 19 The charges against Rivera were eventually dropped. Witnesses say the bloody teeth left on the pavement after three cops pulled the reporter off the Klansman belonged to McLaughlin.

Speaker 19 A local TV news reporter interviewed a bystander for his perspective on the brawl.

Speaker 19 He doesn't give his name, but he's wearing a bright yellow ball cap with a white Aryan resistance logo on it. And at this point, I'd know that voice anywhere.
It's Dennis.

Speaker 30 Geraldo came with the crowd of protesters. He didn't come here to get information out of of us and how we feel about things.
He came with a crowd because he wanted violence when he got violence.

Speaker 30 I think he's got a busted nose or a busted jaw, which he deserves, justly. When is he ever going to learn?

Speaker 19 The most maddening detail in the application for the wiretap is a passing mention that this isn't the first time the ATF has wiretapped Dennis Mahon.

Speaker 19 They'd done it once before,

Speaker 19 back in 1990.

Speaker 19 He'd been suspected of involvement in a series of mail bombs in 1989.

Speaker 19 One of those bombs killed federal judge Robert Vance in Alabama.

Speaker 19 Another killed Robert Robinson, a black civil rights attorney in Georgia.

Speaker 19 Bombs mailed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and the NAACP office in Jacksonville did not go off.

Speaker 19 And early in that investigation, A wiretap recorded Dennis boasting about having made package bombs.

Speaker 19 And he describes with great pride the care he took in disguising them well and using inconspicuous mailing labels to avoid suspicion. But he never said anything specific enough about the targets.

Speaker 19 And he wasn't charged.

Speaker 19 A man named Walter Moody was eventually convicted of those bombings. Moody had been to prison once before for making a package bomb.

Speaker 19 In 1972, he constructed a pipe bomb that he planned to mail to to the car dealership that had repossessed his car.

Speaker 19 But before he could get it into the mail, his wife saw a box on the kitchen counter and opened it.

Speaker 19 She was badly injured and he was sentenced to five years.

Speaker 19 And so it looks like the theory of these later bombings, the one that killed the federal judge, was that Moody wanted revenge on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals because they'd refused to reverse his conviction in that 1972 bombing.

Speaker 19 The idea is that he actually only wanted to kill Judge Vance, and the other three bombings were an elaborate ruse to make the bombing look racially motivated.

Speaker 19 It sounds a little far-fetched, but stranger things have happened, and bombers aren't always the most rational kinds of guys.

Speaker 19 It borders on beyond belief that Dennis Mahon had no criminal record until he was arrested in 2009.

Speaker 19 He'd been investigated in connection with the assassination of a federal judge and the deadliest act of domestic terror in American history.

Speaker 19 He was cleared in both investigations, but how many times can you be a suspect in something so serious if there's nothing going on there?

Speaker 19 He was banned from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. He was designated as a terrorist by Interpol.

Speaker 19 He boasted to reporters about being a serial bomber.

Speaker 19 And for decades, he published his Nazi propaganda and drank himself to sleep.

Speaker 19 In the end, I think the ATF wanted Tom Metzger.

Speaker 19 They kept tabs on Dennis for years in the hopes that they'd turn up something concrete. that would lead them to Metzger.

Speaker 19 But they never did.

Speaker 19 It's impossible to know why they finally made the arrest when they did.

Speaker 19 Most federal crimes have a statute of limitations of five years, but these explosive-related offenses he was charged with are actually an exception to that.

Speaker 19 So they still had more than four years left on a 10-year clock.

Speaker 19 And it couldn't have been because they'd given up on getting Metzger, because they did try.

Speaker 19 His house was raided too, but they failed to get enough evidence to charge him.

Speaker 19 I think it's because Dennis's mom was dying.

Speaker 19 That sounds terrible, but I don't mean they were trying to exploit his grief or something like that.

Speaker 19 Because just a few months before his arrest, Dennis was very drunk, as he often was.

Speaker 19 He and his brother had just been to court to get legal guardianship over their mother. She was dying, and caring for a loved one dying of Alzheimer's disease is a terrible thing to bear.

Speaker 19 And so he's very drunk and he calls Rebecca and he leaves her a voicemail.

Speaker 19 It's a rambling, slurred several minutes,

Speaker 19 but he explains that he's busy taking care of his mother right now and it won't be long.

Speaker 19 He fully expects that she'll pass pretty soon.

Speaker 19 And he says when she's gone,

Speaker 19 quote, I'll go back to my radical, bomb-throwing, sniper shooting realm. But until mom passes away, I really can't do much.
But when she does, look out, Zog.

Speaker 19 Look out, because I've got nothing to lose, motherfuckers. I will shut the country down on electrical power.
Yeah, I know how to do it. I got the weaponry.

Speaker 19 I got the high-powered rifles to shoot down the high-tower power accelerators.

Speaker 19 And he continues from there, and the middle portion is largely unintelligible. There are portions of the transcript that are just marked unintelligible.

Speaker 19 But he picks back up by saying,

Speaker 19 take care.

Speaker 19 Remember. Learn.

Speaker 19 Learn. Get high-power weaponry to take out the high-power towers.
Take out electrical power. Understand that.
There's explosives, high-powered rifles, shoot the insulators.

Speaker 19 We need to do this when the time comes. The time is coming this way close.

Speaker 19 Take care, darling. Remember, the the electrical power grid is the Achilles heel of America.

Speaker 19 Dennis' mother would end up hanging on for another three years, passing away just a few weeks after Dennis was sentenced in 2012.

Speaker 19 But in March of 2009,

Speaker 19 it looked like she was on her way out.

Speaker 19 And Dennis was getting ready for the race war.

Speaker 19 And maybe,

Speaker 19 just maybe,

Speaker 19 this time,

Speaker 19 when an ATF informant brought them credible information that Dennis Mahon was talking about blowing something up,

Speaker 19 they acted on it.

Speaker 19 Dennis Mahon is serving a 40-year sentence at Terre Haute.

Speaker 19 He occasionally writes in letters to the editor at the Barnes Review, a quarterly Holocaust denial magazine founded by Willis Cardo.

Speaker 19 It seems fitting that his story ends in the back pages of the Barnes Review.

Speaker 19 One of the earliest mentions I ever found of Dennis in white supremacist movement literature was in a 1981 issue of another of Cardo's publications, a newspaper called The Spotlight.

Speaker 19 Dennis and Daniel Mahon were featured in an article for their heroic efforts distributing copies of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory newspaper in Florida.

Speaker 19 From prison, he sometimes writes in to boast about all the famous Nazis he once knew. He wrote in to tell his fellow readers that he used to know Art Jones.
He knew Robert Robert Miles.

Speaker 19 He knew Richard Butler.

Speaker 19 He once claimed that he'd met American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, but I don't think that's true. He was only 17 when Rockwell was shot by one of his own followers.

Speaker 19 As far as the official record is concerned, Dennis Mahon alone was responsible for the package bomb that exploded in the Scottsdale Office of Diversity and Dialogue on February 26, 2004.

Speaker 19 His brother was acquitted.

Speaker 19 No one else was ever charged in connection with the plot.

Speaker 19 Dennis and Dennis alone is guilty of that bombing.

Speaker 19 But there are no lone wolves.

Speaker 19 Not really.

Speaker 19 Weird Little Guys is a a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 19 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 19 I will definitely read it, but I probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal.

Speaker 19 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 24 Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los vajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los octimistas, y los pessimistas, los que valor a lo edventro, para los que están lejos, los que no vende lejos, y los que no vende cerca, para los introvertidos, y los extrovertidos, para los que pienzan, y los que hacen, para los que nos mustrado un el camino.

Speaker 19 Coca-cola, para todos.

Speaker 28 Compra una Coca-Cola a una tenda cerca lost.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.