Hella Nation - Evan Wright [59]
“I went back to L.A. after getting discharged from the Army,” he says.
“But I was just ready to blow up like that guy in Falling Down.” It was around this time that Dillavou was arrested for his role in an attack on a black man. “We were driving around doing the usual stuff you do when you see niggers on the street—you know, shouting ‘Nigger’ out the window at them and whatnot.
“I had this idiot in the car, trying to show off and be Mr. White Power. We seen this nigger on the street in a three-piece suit. He smiled and waved at us when we drove by shouting at him. So this guy in the car with me jumped out and hit him in the face—nothing too hard, just slapped him a little bit.
“It was stupid, because there was no way we wouldn’t get caught. I drove an orange Pinto, and everyone knew it was like the white-power car around town.
“After I got arrested, we kicked the idiot who did it out of the organization. There were rumors he might have been a homosexual. And we found out he was dating a Mexican broad.”
Released after serving seventy-seven days in the county jail, Dillavou found sanctuary in Iowa and converted to Christian Identity.
At the 1996 World Congress, Dillavou announces that he has registered to run for political office in Iowa. He plans to campaign as an independent in the race for state representative for the 34th District of Iowa. “It’s not like I can run on segregation,” he says of his candidacy, “but I might be able to do something like bring the Bible back into our schools, which is at least a start.”
ON A LAZY SUNDAY AFTERNOON down on the banks of Hayden Lake, several miles from the closing ceremonies of Aryan World Congress, two scruffy nineteen-year-olds sit with fishing rods. One of them holds an out-of-tune guitar, playing Nirvana and Deep Purple riffs over and over as he tokes on a cigarette.
“The Aryans are a bunch of assholes,” says the one with a flat, stoner’s laugh. “Unless you want to get drunk. They’ll get you drunker than hell.
“After high school, my friend Eric became an Aryan. Bald, stocky, two hundred and eighty pounds, he was a big boy. So they gave him the name Ogre and tattooed it on his hand.
“Mostly, they’d just sit around Eric—I mean Ogre’s—house drinking beer, talking about how they wanted to go to L.A. and ‘take people out’ like Jean-Claude Van Damme in that movie Hard Target. It was pretty stupid,” he says, flicking his cigarette into an empty, wide-mouth beer bottle.
THE FINAL ACT of the 1996 Aryan World Congress is the Soldier’s Ransom. After prayers are offered to Yahweh, Nazi colors are raised and solemn tribute is given to the martyrs of the Aryan Nations war—the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives setting off bombs in synagogues, burning crosses in people’s yards and assaulting strangers in the street.
When it is over, Pastor Butler pulls a reporter aside and offers these final words: “The press seeks to convince the people that we’re losers, we have no agenda, and we’re haters, bigots, discriminators. Well, the press isn’t the people. I’d rather let the people decide for themselves what we are.”
THE BAD AMERICAN
1. THE KILLING
KONSTANTIN SIMBERG HAD LIVED in America for about a year and a half when, according to police, three of his friends led him into the Yavapai woods north of Phoenix on December 15, 2001, and prepared to kill him. Simberg was twenty-one. Two of the alleged killers were Soviet-bloc immigrants like Simberg. The third was a rich kid, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Arizona State named Chris Andrews, a private-school