Aryans to set up shop in Pennsylvania

By Nicholas K. Geranios

Associated Press

SPOKANE — The Aryan Nations will set up a Pennsylvania outpost where supporters can gather now that the white supremacist group’s northern Idaho compound has been sold at a bankruptcy auction, a leader said Wednesday.

There was some confusion this week after Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler said the group would remain headquartered in northern Idaho, while his anointed successor said it would relocate to Ulysses, Pa.

"Aryan Nations is being run, at this time, out of a house in a subdivision of Hayden (Idaho) where Pastor Butler resides," said August Kreis III, the group’s director of information.

"What we are doing is setting up another ‘churchgrounds’ where Aryan Nation members and Identity adherents can gather during the course of the year," Kreis, who lives in Ulysses, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Butler, 83, for two decades maintained a 20-acre compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, that was a home and meeting ground for his followers. He lost a civil rights lawsuit last year, which resulted in a declaration of bankruptcy and the sale of the compound.

Butler has since been living in a home — paid for by a supporter — in nearby Hayden.

"The headquarters will stay here," Butler said in a telephone conversation Wednesday. The Pennsylvania property will be a branch of the group, Butler said.

Kreis said the office in Pennsylvania "will be run with the strictest of military discipline by top-notch professionally trained kinsfolk," an apparent reference to the ex-convicts and rowdy members who often gathered at the old compound.

The civil rights lawsuit was filed after three Aryan security guards shot at and assaulted a mother and son in a car that drove past the compound in 1998. A civil jury awarded a $6.3 million judgment to Victoria and Jason Keenan last fall.

Ray Redfeairn of Dayton, Ohio, was recently named the group’s new national director and will succeed Butler upon the latter’s death. Redfeairn has said he will move soon to the Pennsylvania property.

The new location will allow members to "gather and worship without interference of the media and so-called authorities," Kreis wrote. "This way we can get back to the business of training and educating our folks on the privacy and security of secluded acreage."

The Aryan Nations is part of the so-called Christian Identity movement, whose followers believe white people are the lost tribe of Israel. Members of the movement are anti-Semitic and consider minorities subhuman.

Kreis denied that Aryan Nations has dropped its plan of turning the Pacific Northwest into a minority-free homeland.

"There is a large presence of Identity kinsfolk in Idaho which have put down roots and are never moving anywhere else," Kreis said.