The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux

Author:Louis Theroux [LOUIS THEROUX]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

6

JERRY GRUIDL

Before leaving London, I’d read that Pastor Richard Butler, the aging führer of the Aryan Nations, would be hosting a World Congress for his fellow Aryans later in the year. It was over seven years since my visit to the headquarters and my conversation with Jerry Gruidl about his fondness for Are You Being Served?. Since then, the bits of news I heard suggested the organization was on the skids. Hate groups as a whole were being clamped down on in the post-9/11 anti-terrorism climate. In 2000 Butler had lost his compound, bankrupted by a court judgment after his bodyguards attacked a woman and her son at his gates, allegedly mistaking the sound of their car backfiring for a gunshot. Given how doddering he’d been, I kept expecting to hear that Butler had expired. He appointed a successor, a neo-Nazi called Neumann Britton, but Britton predeceased him. Butler found another candidate, Harold Ray Redfeairn. Then Redfeairn died too. Perhaps fearing a jinx, Butler stopped appointing successors. “Rasputin’s got nothing on this guy,” one hate-group expert commented.

The latest news concerned a trip Butler made to Phoenix in 2003, when a young female partisan he’d been traveling with was arrested at Spokane airport on an outstanding forgery warrant and unmasked as “Bianca Trump,” veteran of more than 180 hardcore adult movies, including Barely Legal Latinas, Brassiere to Eternity, and Little White Girl, Big Black Man. In a group for whom “race mixing” was the ultimate no-no, it was a spectacular misstep. Aryan Nations Chief of Security Rick Spring issued a press release quashing the idea that Butler’s relationship with the woman whose porno nickname had been “the Latin Princess” was anything more than platonic: “She had only been staying in Idaho a few days, helping around the house,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less; and if anyone wants to make jokes about anything else, then they do not know Pastor Butler.”

Perhaps because of his poor health, Butler had held no World Congress in 2003, and so the 2004 event was being thought of as a last hurrah.

I found Jerry in the phone book. I called him up from Las Vegas, reaching him by coincidence on his seventy-first birthday. He sounded a little frail. “Barbara?” he said, to someone I hoped was in the room with him, “’bout how long was it that I came down from Aryan Nations? It’s been a while. Uggh! It’s close to five years.” Barbara was his daughter, he said. I told him I was following up on stories I’d covered over the years. “Well, can I be on your list of people to visit?” Jerry said. “It’s good to hear your voice. There’s been a lot of changes at Aryan Nations. Pastor Butler was sued and lost his crown . . . Have you ever had another contact with the Garsides?”

I visited him some weeks later, driving east from Reno, where I was staying at the time, turning north at Winnemucca, into Oregon. The high desert softened into prairie.

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