Bearing Witness (7 page)

Benny chuckled. “Oh, man,” he said, shaking his head in amusement. “What an image, eh?”

I settled back in my chair with the list of bids. Reaching behind me to the credenza, I flipped on the radio. I was just in time to hear the opening chords of the Eagles' “Hotel California.”

“Mmmm,” I sighed, transported back to the summer before my sophomore year of high school and a cute junior on the varsity football team named Chuck Nathan—back to a time when “cute” and “varsity letter” equaled Mr. Right. Chuck was the love of my life for six whole weeks, and I wore his letter sweater with pride on even the hottest nights that August.

“So what's next?” Benny asked.

I reached for the list of bids. “Depends on what the students find on the Internet.” I frowned at the entries. “In fact, the rest of this case depends on that.”

“How so?”

I leaned across the desk and turned the list toward him. “If there really is a conspiracy, we ought to be able to see a pattern from the winners. First of all, there ought to be a fairly small group, but large enough to divide up all those jobs—I'd guess somewhere between five and ten. More than ten, I don't see how they could run a conspiracy—too many players, too many variables. So, the first hurdle is the number of winners.”

“And then what?” Benny asked.

“A comparison of the winning bids to the cost estimates.”

“What cost estimates?” Benny asked.

I showed how each bid invitation in the
CBD
included an estimated cost range for the project—$3 to $6 million for one, $5 to $8 million for another. Since the central goal of a bid-rigging conspiracy is to allow each conspirator to “win” one contract with a higher-than-competitive bid, the bad guys have to decide in advance what the winning bid will be so that the rest of them can be sure to submit higher bids. How did they decide how high to go with the winning bid? On government projects, Uncle Sam is kind enough to provide that answer with its cost estimates.

“You see?” I said. “If the government's cost estimate for a particular project is four to seven million, and if there really is a bid-rigging conspiracy, which end of the cost estimate would you expect the so-called low bid to be closer to?”

He looked at me and nodded. “Good thinking.”

“We'll see if that happened here.” I leaned back in my chair. “If so, we still have a case.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Benny said.

“I guess so.” I stared up at the ceiling and sighed. “If we still have a case, that means I've got at least two miserable months of trial preparation ahead of me.” I shook my head glumly. “Sometimes I wish someone would drive a stake through the heart of this lawsuit.”

Chapter Six

For more than thirty years, the good burghers of South St. Louis have made the Reavis Banquet Center the place of choice to celebrate their weddings, confirmations, high school graduations, and other special occasions. As such, it's normally a place for merrymaking—drinks flow, buffet tables groan, and big bands play top tunes from decades ago.

But not this Sunday morning.

Today, the main hall of the Reavis Banquet Center felt more like a chapel. Gone were the steam trays and portable bars and banquet tables. In their place were about fifteen rows of folding chairs, sixteen chairs per row, all facing the elevated stage at the head of the room where the big bands normally set up. The stage was empty except for a podium in the center, a flagpole in the right corner, and a large white cross on a stand in the other corner. Taped organ music played softly over the speakers. Every chair was taken.

Jonathan and I were in the back row. I gazed around the room, trying to gauge the audience. It was a white, working-class crowd—mostly blue collar, with a few shopkeepers and bank tellers scattered in the mix. The men looked uncomfortable in their sports jackets. I saw a few adjust their ties or run a finger around the inside of their buttoned collars. The older women looked dowdy; the younger ones favored bleached hair and chewing gum. At first glance there was a Norman Rockwell feel to it, but after a few minutes you sensed the slightly harder edge to this crowd. Any doubts, of course, were dispelled by the presence of all those uniformed cops. I counted a dozen St. Louis police officers positioned along the walls around the room. There was a similar number of state troopers outside, spread around the perimeter of the building, their walkie-talkies crackling. Several had nodded at Jonathan as we walked in.

On our drive down, I had jokingly told Jonathan that we'd probably be the first Jews in the building since it opened in 1957. The irony seemed amusing then. It sure didn't now. Although the crowd was obviously gathered for a Sunday morning sermon, this would be no ordinary religious event. For today we were going to hear from Bishop Kurt Robb, former Green Beret and high school driver's ed instructor, currently the spiritual leader of the Church of the Aryan Jesus and the Grand Commandant of Spider.

Bishop Robb was also the main target of Jonathan's criminal investigation. That was why we were here. Although several of his sermons were available in printed form and on cassettes—through his own mail-order operation for the true believers, in the evidence files of the Attorney General's office for the investigators—Jonathan had yet to observe a live performance. Since he'd soon be observing another type of live performance, namely, Bishop Robb's command appearance before the grand jury to answer Jonathan's questions, he decided to check him out here first.

When Jonathan had mentioned where he was going Sunday morning before our drive to Springfield, I asked to join him. After witnessing Gloria's murder, I was more than a little curious to see one of the skinheads' spiritual leaders in action.

Bishop Robb's followers had rented Reavis Banquet Center for the morning so that he'd have an opportunity to bring his message to the city folk. It was part of his grand plan—to establish a viable neo-Nazi organization near where he believed his true constituents were located: in the larger cities and suburbs. As he was fond of saying, “You can't run a national revolution from a kooky commune in Montana.”

Stepping onto the stage was a stout, middle-aged man with thinning, slicked-back hair, wire-rim glasses, and a pencil mustache. The taped organ music ended abruptly as he approached the podium and cleared his throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a surprisingly high-pitched voice, “welcome to our special morning with our very special guest. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, our guest has asked that we not applaud.” He paused and looked toward the side, where the door had opened. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to present Bishop Kurt Robb.”

Through the side door filed eight men in their twenties and thirties, moving at a stride somewhere between a march and a swagger. All wore jeans, dark boots, and what looked like black-and-gold high school letter jackets without the letters. All had buzz cuts and all wore aviator sunglasses. They took up positions along the floor in front of the stage and turned in unison to face the audience, their hands clasped behind their backs, their legs at shoulder width.

There was a moment of tense silence, and then a tall man in a white robe entered from the side. It was Bishop Kurt Robb. You could almost feel a shiver run through the crowd as he stepped onto the stage. He was wearing tinted horn-rims and his trademark green beret. He paused to shake the hand of the man who had introduced him. It was a solemn handshake. The man nodded deferentially and quickly stepped down from the stage.

Robb was now the sole figure on the stage. He stared at the audience. Below him, his security guards stood motionless. Robb's straight brown hair was brushed at an angle across his forehead in a creepy echo of his hero. All that was missing was black hair dye and the brush mustache.

After a moment, he nodded somberly. “Good morning, my friends.”

“Good morning,” they murmured back at him.

“I have come here this morning, good people, to bring you news, to tell you that what happened in Germany many years ago is happening today in this country.” He had a deep, modulated voice with a hint of hickory in the accent and honey in the timbre. It was the smooth voice of a folksy radio personality.

“The Jews are grabbing control of everything they can lay their greasy hands on. My friends, this is a replay of Germany in the early decades of this century. But there, as we all remember, the Aryan people had the courage and the character to rise up in indignation to reclaim their birthright, to reclaim their legacy.” He paused, his eyes sweeping slowly around the room. “That, too, will happen here, my friends. The Lord Jesus teaches us that it is God's will, and God's will is inexorable.”

He leaned forward on the podium, his voice more fervent now. “When that blessed day comes, praise Jesus, in a time not too distant from today, then we must each of us be prepared to fight for that just and holy cause, for that righteous and God-fearing government dedicated to the preservation and propagation of a nation of Christian men and women of Aryan descent.” Another pause, and then a pensive shake of his head. “Jesus teaches us that there will be bloodshed and that there will be fighting and that there will sacrifice. But Jesus implores each of us to do our part in this holy cause, in this, His holy war, blessed be He.” Another pause, and then, in a louder voice, “It is our destiny.”

As the sermon continued, Bishop Robb eased his foot off the rhetorical pedal in order to explain for the newcomers in the crowd the basic tenets of the “Identity Church” movement, within which his peculiar church clearly fit. Anglo-Saxons were the “chosen people”—the lost tribe of the House of Israel, the true descendants of Adam and Eve, the actual chosen people for whom Jesus was sent. Jews were the children of Satan—“Satan's spawn,” in Bishop Robb's words, born not of Adam and Eve but of Eve and Satan, set on the earth to destroy the “chosen people” through Talmudic teaching, forced interracial mixings, and sexual perversions. Jews had mated with beasts of the jungle to produce the subhuman “mud peoples”—blacks, Asians, Hispanics. And now, in fulfillment of their mission as Satan's spawn, the Jews were financing guerrilla training of the “mud peoples” to enable them to seize control of the major cities and enslave the Aryan youth of the nation through the dissemination of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs.

It was a theology so warped that at first it sounded like a bad
Saturday Night Live
routine—and then you realized with a shudder that Bishop Robb was real, and these congregants were true believers.

Jonathan had given me a brief bio on the drive down. Robb had returned to his hometown, Baton Rouge, after his final tour of duty as a Green Beret in Vietnam. He took a job as a driver's ed instructor at his old high school, but the place felt even more alien than Southeast Asia. His rage grew as he watched antiwar protesters mock his America. Women's liberation, civil rights marches, gay rights movements—it was an abominable travesty. When he finally attended his first meeting of the Baton Rouge chapter of the American Nazi Party, it was as if he'd discovered that special place he called home.

It was not a smooth homecoming. Over the next two decades he would drift from one white supremacist organization to another, often severing his ties after bitter fallings out over seemingly trivial ideological differences. In the early 1980s, Robb rose to an influential position within the Louisiana-based National Emancipation of Our White Seed, but he disappeared in 1983, only to resurface three years later as the editor of the
Battle Axe News
, the house organ of the Christian Defense League. Before that organization collapsed in the late 1980s amid a blizzard of federal indictments, it had been tied to the firebombing of an Orthodox synagogue in Belleville, Illinois, and the attempted bombing of an oil pipeline from Tulsa to Chicago that ran along southern Missouri curving up through St. Louis.

Then came another gap in Robb's biography until he surfaced in 1994 as the spiritual leader of the Church of the Aryan Jesus, located in a rural area of Jefferson County south of St. Louis. Last year, Robb expanded his responsibilities by announcing the formation of “Spider,” an organization whose mission was to bring the neo-Nazi movement into the urban centers of America. “Adolf Hitler created the Third Reich in downtown Berlin,” he announced at the opening ceremonies, “not in some remote patch of the Black Forest.” He proudly billed Spider's St. Louis offices as the “Midwest Headquarters of the White Race.” Although he was savvy enough to keep the swastika off the literature and logos, Spider's official emblem was still spooky: a black widow spider with a grinning skull in place of the spider's thorax.

Robb was reaching the end of his sermon. “Let us rise,” he announced as he turned toward the flagpole. He placed his hand over his heart. The congregants got to their feet amid the rumbling and scraping of the folding chairs. They all placed their hands over their hearts.

One of Robb's assistants had stepped onto the stage by the flagpole. He reached down to grasp the end of the limp flag, and then stepped back to unfurl it for all to see. It was a replica of the American flag, except that in place of the stars there was a white cross against a black background.

“We pledge our allegiance,” Robb solemnly recited, accompanied in unison by the crowd, “to our fighting Aryans and to a pure, white United States. We offer praise unto Jesus Christ, our Aryan Messiah, and we beseech Him to lead our sacred army to victory and to join us in our holy battle cry: Free America!”

After a long pause, Bishop Kurt Robb turned back to the crowd. “God bless you,” he said quietly, dropping his head, “and amen.”

“Amen,” they answered.

Disheartened, I watched as members of the audience crowded forward to shake his hand or touch his sleeve. With his slight twang and folksy mannerisms, Kurt Robb could have been a commercial airline pilot coming over the PA system to tell us that “we're gonna keep that lil' ol' seat belt sign on jes' a bit longer 'cause we may be catching a patch of turbulence up ahead a ways.”

There was nothing Hitleresque about this Hitler wannabe, and that made him even scarier.

***

Hey, Jew Boy!”

Jonathan spun toward the voice. There were two of them coming down the sidewalk toward us. White guys with buzz cuts—one tall and one short, dressed like Robb's bodyguards in faded jeans and letter jackets. The short guy had a goatee and crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He walked with a bowlegged strut. The tall guy had a beer gut and moved more like a bear. In one of his huge hands he was holding a wooden dowel the length of a baseball bat and the diameter of a broom handle. With a snap of his wrist, he sliced it back and forth through the air.

Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh
.

I glanced behind me. Our car was less than twenty feet away. We'd parked in a residential area two blocks over from the Reavis Banquet Center. The center's lot had been full when we arrived.

Jonathan pulled me close as he moved backward down the sidewalk toward the car. For some reason, I thought of all the new windows and windshield in his car.

“Don't be stupid,” Jonathan told them, his voice unyielding.

The big guy looked over at his comrade and chuckled. “Hear that, Bobby? Guy here says, don't be stupid. You feeling stupid?”

Bobby snorted. “Fuck no, partner.”

“Me, neither.” He turned to Jonathan. “I'll tell you who's stupid, Rabbi. Guy like you who shows up at a Bishop Robb event, sticking that big Jew nose where it don't belong. That's what I call stupid. Ain't that right, Bobby?”

“Fucking aye, partner.”

Whoosh. Whoosh
.

We were even with Jonathan's car. He reached into his jacket and handed me the keys.

“Get in the car,” he said, and then he turned to face them. “Listen carefully,” he said, pointing his finger at the big guy. “There are two dozen cops back at the building.”

The big guy laughed. “That's back there, Rabbi, but we ain't back there, are we? Two dozen? Shit, man, two
thousand
cops back
there
ain't going do you any fucking good right
here
. Ain't that right, Bobby?”

“Fucking aye, partner.”

I'd taken a step toward the car, but stopped. I couldn't just leave Jonathan to face these thugs alone. My heart was racing. I didn't know what I could do, but I refused to abandon him.

He was standing his ground, his fists clenched, seemingly unfazed by the danger. Although I'd taken a self-defense class for six months, it was as if everything I'd learned had vanished in the face of these animals. I glanced around, looking for something to use as a weapon.