Front Burner - Weekend Listen: Exposing the truth by living a lie

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

FBI undercover agent Scott Payne’s job was to infiltrate the most dangerous gangs of our times: outlaw bikers, drug cartels and the international neo-Nazi networks hellbent on inciting a race war. He was taking down these groups from within. And Scott was good at it — people confided in him their most audacious plans for mass violence and domestic terrorism.In the second season of White Hot Hate, host Michelle Shephard gives you an unvarnished view of a life undercover. Because after a 28-year-long career pretending to be somebody else, Agent Payne is ready to tell his side of the story. This series was produced alongside a book co-written by Scott Payne and Michelle Shephard titled Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis.More episodes of White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/tNLnXF

There are two kinds of people in the world. Backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision-making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long-term success. Workday, moving business forever forward. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie. We have a very special bonus episode for you today from Agent Pale Horse,

the second season of CBC's White Hot Hate. FBI Special Agent Scott Payne went undercover to infiltrate the most dangerous gangs of our times. Outlaw bikers, drug cartels, and an international neo-Nazi network that wants to start a race war. What's it like to lie your whole life in order to expose the truth? To join the KKK one month and then be hired a hitman the next? To almost lose your job, your marriage, and your mind? After a 28 year long career pretending to be somebody else, Scott Payne is ready to tell his own story. Now here's the first episode of Agent Pale Horse. Have a listen. The following episode contains strong language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening.

Okay, so let me start with the bass. All right. What a great group of guys. Okay, so how did you... Let me introduce you to Scott. He's 6'4", 260, likes cowboy boots and Jack Daniels. And in the summer of 2019, he wanted to join a group of white supremacists. They called themselves The Base, and Scott had already passed a crucial phone interview.

That Saturday, they reached out to me and said, hey, we'd like to have you in The Base. I said, awesome, I'd love to be here. He says, you're going to be contacted by your closest cell leader. It turned out that the closest cell leader was a guy going by the name of the militant Buddhist, TMB, and he was in Rome, Georgia. Now we're not emailing, now we're not texting.

Now it's not a voice phone call. Now I'm actually gonna meet somebody. So I drive, you know, it might be a four hour drive down to Rome, Georgia, and it's kind of a rural area. It's a small town. I was instructed to pull into town. Even told me what parking lot to park in. In downtown Rome, there is a statue of a Roman wolf, oddly enough. And he said, when you get there, take a picture of that Roman wolf and send it to me.

So I'm driving, I'm keep looping on these streets and I see the Roman wolf statue. I take a picture of it and I send it to TMB and I end up parking on a pretty steep hill. It is hot out, suffocating hot August Georgian heat with a darkening sky that looks pretty ominous. Scott stands by his truck under a tangle of power lines and he spots two figures coming up the hill. And I see a guy who's probably about 6'2", about 21 years old, probably about 220 pounds. I mean, he's not a small guy, a little frumpy maybe, not like super muscular, pretty thick glasses on,

mopish hair pushed over the side. I don't remember him being dressed like anything crazy, but the guy walking with him, who I learned is pestilence, he's wearing a tank top of some black metal band. The guy walking with him, who I learn is pestilence, he's wearing a tank top of some black metal band. He has on black BDU pants that are bloused into his eight inch combat boots, tactical boots. And his head is shaved on the sides, but his hair is long, like it's,

I mean a ponytail probably down the middle of his back right so no harm no foul I get out hey you know so I don't even know if we shook hands and TMB says I need you to put your phone in airplane mode and I'm like okay and I'm expecting that right he pulls out this thing that I've never seen it looks like some kind of Geiger counter I mean it's got lights all over the triangle card and and I'm looking at going hmm so he wants me no big deal I'm

fine as TMB is walking down towards the back of my truck on the driver's side that thing he's holding his hand starts making all kinds of racket. And I can see the lights kind of jumping and I'm like, oh crap, I'm thinking to myself, he tells me to shut my cell phone off and I'm like, does this thing pick up a cell signal? And I'm thinking, oh man, this is not good. I guess now is a good time to tell you that Scott is an undercover cop. FBI Special Agent Scott Payne.

He's not wearing a wire just in case he gets patted down. But there is a GPS tracker on his truck. So when he says not good, he means holy shit, this is not good. You know you get kind of the fighter flight, you know, and I'm like well it's definitely picking up what's on my truck and he's not even close yet and is picking it up. I don't realize I'm doing it really but I'm already setting my right leg back like almost fighter stance, know not like bowing up but I'm getting ready and as he's getting towards the back of the truck Pestilence says and you think it's the power lines and TMB is says you know what I don't know and he walks over so

he starts walking over the power lines and that thing goes nuts. And he's like, shit man, yeah, it is picking up the power lines. So he tells me, hey, I need you to follow us. We're gonna go somewhere else. Well, as I get back in my truck, I'm now calling the cover team.

And I'm saying, hey, you need to shut this tractor off. But while I'm talking, I'm actually like bringing my drink up to my mouth because I don't know if they're looking from their car. I don't know if anybody else is following me. I don't know. I'm holding the phone down in my lap and I'm talking trying to not be so obvious. Scott and his FBI cover team don't know a lot about these guys in this group, but they do know they're probably armed and definitely paranoid about their secrecy. So that tracker. And what the team tells me is we're not sure if we shut it off remotely, if we can get it

back on and I said well you need to shut it off or it's gonna be probably the quickest undercover meat I've ever had so I'm following him and he pulls into this parking lot of what appears to be an abandoned or at least nobody's working while we're there concrete plant I just kind of giggle and I'm like, yeah, empty concrete plant. I mean, in what movies has nobody died at the empty concrete plant? All the like, half the action movies I've seen. Scott gets out of the truck and stands arms out so TMB can use his whatever wand thing to search him again. And it starts to rain, like the heavens open up in a southern monsoon.

Perfect pathetic fallacy for this Hollywood drama. Scott is trying to look nonchalant, but his heart is beating louder than the rain. If he needs backup, he knows the team doesn't have eyes on him. TMB moves towards the truck. Like they said they shut it off, but what if remotely it didn't shut off, right? There's all these what ifs going through your mind. And he goes past the truck.

Truck passed the test. We get back in and now I follow him in pestilence. I hung out, got to know him a little bit, had a couple of drinks, and after passing the face-to-face meet, I am now gifted with a black balaclava, which was the signature for the bass members, and I'm afforded a patch with the three runes on which was the bass symbol. So I go back that night to my hotel room and I meet with one of the case agents who flew down to Georgia because this case is bigger than Georgia it's all over the nation and the world. And he took a picture of me.

I put my balaclava on and I put the patch right in my mouth. And there's a picture of me like in a red Harley-Davidson shirt with two thumbs up going, I'm in. I'm Michelle Shepard. From CBC, this is White Hot Hate, Season 2, Agent Pale Horse. Episode 1, The Insider. If you listened to the first season of White Hot Hate, maybe this is all sounding a little familiar. And you're right.

We began that season with another infiltrator. Voice memo. I'm trying to get everything I can remember. I've caught my head. Something just ended and I didn't record it. His name is Patrick. He's about 5'10". Grew up in the country.

Used to live in Winnipeg. That's Ryan Thorpe, who was a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press newspaper. In 2019, someone in his city had been putting up flyers that read, Save your race, join the base. So he tried to find out more. He filled out the online forms, passed a vetting call with the group's leader, and eventually met up with the base's local recruiter in a park. Fuck! We spoke for the man a half. There was so much.

Later, while running home, Ryan regurgitated everything they'd talked about, recording onto his phone. He ranted with homophobic and racist language. He's anti-Semitic. He talked about fighting a race war. He talked about derailing a train that we were nearby, a sabotaging train tracks. He is a violent extremist. Hold on. That violent extremist was Patrick Matthews.

He was a reservist with the Canadian Armed Forces, a combat engineer who was trained in the use of explosives. Two weeks after that meeting in the park, Ryan and his editors decided to out Matthews in front page reports. The story blew up, and soon after, Matthews disappeared. American sheriffs along Manitoba's border say they're on the lookout for a Beausheur man with alleged ties to a neo-Nazi group. Former military reservist, Patrick Matthews,

has been missing for more than a week. RCMP are investigating... He packed up his home in small town Manitoba, gave away his four beloved cats, and fled. All police could find was his red pickup truck dumped near the US border. Matthews was a hot topic among both the Canadian and American feds. We've got to find this guy who has now been outed as Patrick Matthews because

Ryan Thorpe the journalist infiltrated him. Where's this guy? What is he doing? But Matthews wasn't Scott's main concern at the time. After he'd successfully made it into the base, he'd been busy hanging out with the Georgia crew, building a case. We're just trying to infiltrate, ingratiate, try to find out if they're actually planning to do something really bad or not. All I know is I'm going down to do another training. I don't know who's always going to be there.

He attends a training camp at TMB's. TMB is the online moniker for the guy who vetted Scott. He still lives at home with his dad on a sprawling rural property outside Rome, Georgia. And that's where Scott, whose alias was Pale Horse, and the other base members shoot guns, share tips on how to survive in the woods, and prepare for the race war they plan to spark. I pull up to the barn, and I'm looking at the cars, and I'm going, okay, that's Helter Skelter's car, that's Pestilent's car, that's TMB's dad's truck, blah, blah, blah. And

I'm like, there's an extra body. There's not enough cars for it. But I don't have my glasses on. Great part of aging. So I'm like, huh. And I go walking up and I see this, I don't know, mid-late 20s guy, reddish hair, but it's all bushy and a bushy beard.

I walk up and I'm thinking maybe some new member I'll find out who it is what's going on and then he starts to speak and I'm like hmm that sounds Canadian because you know I mean I grew up in the 80s right as a big time at Strange Brew was one of my favorite movies so you know and I love SCTV as well. But he immediately pretty much tells me, he's like, how you doing? I'm punished snake. You may or may not have heard about me. It was Patrick Matthews using the brand new call sign punished snake, like it was an added disguise while on the lam. And I'm like, Oh my goodness, he's here. He's here in Georgia. But you know,

being an undercover, I go, Holy shit, man. Welcome to the United States, brother. And I hug him. There's this huge manhunt on for him. Everybody's talking about it in the FBI. All of a sudden you roll up and you're like, holy shit, that's him. That's Matthews. What did you feel at that moment? It hadn't even been reported in Congress. They had congressional meetings where they're going,

we now know that there is a violent white supremacist from Canada who's somewhere in the United States. And I walk up and I go, oh my gosh, what are the odds, you know? Just Matthew's luck, he escaped the clutches of Canadian authorities only to jump right into the arms of the FBI. As some people say, it's better to be lucky than good sometimes, right? And of course, as soon as I could, I let the case team know, and they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, man, he's here. It's awesome. And now he's staying here. So now, for the next whatever, four months, every time I go to training in Georgia,

I'm hanging out with Pat. There are two kinds of people in the world. Backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long term success. Workday moving business forever forward.

Oh Canada, a vast idyllic land filled with beavers, loons, lumberjacks, and polite friendly folks. We have those things for sure, but there's a darker side to the Great White North full of mystery, crime, the paranormal, and dark history. Join me, Mike Brown, and co-host Matthew Stockton every Monday for the Dark Poutine podcast as we tell dark stories from north of the 49th parallel with the Ottawa Game covering more international cases.

You can listen to Dark Poutine for free wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Scott spends months undercover as Pale Horse with Patrick Matthews and the Georgia Cell, training, hiking, and listening as they discuss their plans. And he's recording everything. All right. Oh, shit. UCE 8667.

It is August the 3rd. It's approximately 9.24 a.m. Eastern time. It's Saturday. I am going to be... Eventually, those long hours, they pay off. Five months after Scott infiltrates the base, Matthews is arrested, along with six other members of the group, in a dramatic takedown that makes headlines around the world. And tonight the FBI crackdown continues on white supremacist groups ahead of a pro-gun

rally next Monday in Richmond, Virginia. The men weren't charged for being racist. That's not illegal. Neither were they charged for domestic terrorism, which isn't a federal offense. But they were indicted for offenses ranging from possessing and transporting firearms and conspiracy to murder. Well today, three suspected members of a neo-Nazi group were arrested in Georgia charged with targeting left-wing activists. The case against them was so strong, the evidence so damning, everyone pleaded out.

And they were handed sentences ranging from six years to as long as 20. When we were researching these cases for the last season, we kept coming across evidence provided by the UCE. That stands for the FBI undercover employee. That UCE came up so often, we started to imagine that we knew him. He had recorded hours of conversations between Matthews and his co-defendants as they talked about shooting cops and massacring black people. When TMB and another base member took a road trip to case the house where their targets lived, the UCE was behind the wheel. And then we

heard his voice on the secretly recorded tape when it was presented in court. Low, gravelly, and southern. But he was an FBI undercover. There's a reason we couldn't put a name or a face to the voice. I'll call him Scott, because that's what he said his name was, but I'm sure that's not his name. The most of what we knew then about the undercover agent actually came from a man named Tom Lane. He was probably 20 plus years older than the rest of them, 6'2", 6'3", 240, you know, big man. Tattoos all over his arms. You know, they all kind of looked up to him, I think. Tom was the father of TMB, real name Luke Austin Lane.

Luke had established the base's so-called small man cell in Georgia. And most of their training took place at his dad's 100 acre property, which is where I reached Tom for an interview a few months after his 22-year-old son had been arrested. You know, when I first saw him, I was thinking, this guy's either a pedophile or he's FBI. I asked him, I said, Scott, you FBI agent?

He said, he said, no, no, man, I don't remember exactly what he said, but he denied it. And I told Luke he was FBI. And Luke said, no, we vetted him. We vetted him. I don't know how they went about their vetting, but it wasn't good, evidently. But why would you think he would be FBI? I mean, why would you think that there would be

an FBI guy hanging around? Why did I think there would be an FBI guy hanging around? Why did I think there would be an FBI guy hanging around? Well, anytime there's anything to do with race, which I knew whatever Luke was into was probably racial, which I don't agree with that, but they got their ears out everywhere. The AD, anything that's got a hint of racism, they're going to get in on it. You know, they think that's the worst thing in the world nowadays. I knew from court documents that hint of racism was Nazi propaganda, and in particular, a flag hanging on Luke's bedroom wall.

Yeah, I mean, I saw the flag in there, but you know, kids that age, they're gonna kind of dabble in there, but you know kids that age they're going to kind of dabble in things and you know they're still trying to find out who they want to be. Luke's been all over the place. One time he wanted to move to Russia and then next thing you know he's wanting to move to Ukraine and fight the Russians and he didn't know what he wanted to do. He was just a young boy you know know, trying to find his way. And, you know, I figured he had moved to something else. What was the actual flag?

Was it something identifiable? I think it was a Nazi flag. I think it was a swastika. I think. I don't remember what it was, to tell you the truth. It was a big red flag. So when you saw it you just you didn't recognize it as that necessarily or you thought okay, he's going through a Nazi phase. Well, yeah. Yeah, I just figured he was going through a little phase. Remember when I told you, oh well,

when we first met, I said I'd heard that podcast and I was cussing at the computer while it was going on. I'm like, that dude is a liar. Okay. That's the crazy thing. All the time we were reporting and wondering about this Scott, he was listening, wanting to talk to us. Yeah.

So he knew it was a Nazi flag. I mean, I've sat on the porch of that guy and drank. I drank his alcohol, he drank mine. He's listened to pestilence. My educated opinion, he's saying that because he's on a call and he didn't want to tie himself to anything nefarious. He knows exactly what a swastika is.

He knows exactly. Now to think that your kid's going through a phase to find out what's what, okay. How long do you want the phase to last? Two years? Four years? Six years? What's a phase? But you know, Tom Lane making excuses for his son didn't really surprise Scott. In law enforcement, I have really, really seen a parent's love.

What I mean by that is I can show you a video of your kid doing crime on camera. Their voice, them, the parent will still say, that's not my kid. I still love my kid. And that's what parents do. What Scott says he doesn't have time for are accusations of entrapment, which seemed to be Tom Lane's explanation at the time for why his son was sitting in jail awaiting trial. I feel like the, you know, the FBI implant kind of led them in that direction.

Certainly he didn't do anything to deter it, you know, these were young guys like 19, 20 years old, and I think they pretty much just took advantage of their youth. You know, I don't know that the base wasn't created by the FBI. You know, I don't much trust anything they do. The reason that we got involved is because of the crazy stuff that was being posted. All I know is people that go online, covert for the FBI, were talking about this guy, TMB. They're like, this guy is, I mean, saying some crazy stuff. That was before me. That was before. That's what put them on the radar.

And the court documents make it clear that Luke Lane was an active recruiter. It ebbs and flows. You might pick up a new member and they do the interview, they pass, they get the face-to-face vetting, and then they're down in Georgia training with us. They're spewing hate and pro-Hitler and all this stuff and then they get off on these tangents of giant Agarthans living in Middle Earth with Hitler and they're coming back one day and I'm just like, I need a drink. Maybe I am too old to do this. In the end, that's exactly what he decided.

Although he was only 50, undercover work takes a toll. So Scott turned in the badge in the summer of 2021. He could have ridden off into retirement on his Harley with his wife on the back, belting out some country tunes and sipping whiskey in obscurity. And I probably would have never known who the UCE was or thought of him again. But then he decided to talk to Rolling Stone. He wasn't allowed to tell his story until the day after he retired. That's Paul Solitareff, a staff contributor at Rolling Stone magazine.

He wrote a profile on Scott that cast him as the most storied FBI agent since Joe Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco. I didn't set out to write about Scott. I set out to write about the kids he was chasing. But once you started talking, it turned into a profile of Scott. How did that happen? He left me no choice. You know, the force of Scott's personality and the force of his persona, right? He just has this extraordinary ability to make himself the center of every room he walks into. And I challenge anyone who meets Scott

to write about something on the margins after you've met that guy. Shall I just start? Paul is an incredibly vivid writer. Go for it. He's been lifting all his life and has the setup to prove it. Mailbox quads and meatplow arms that dispose him to sleeveless tees. In his piece, Scott comes off as a type of superhero,

who not only took down the base, but in his 28 years in law enforcement, also managed to infiltrate the KKK and biker gangs and put away aspiring killers, opioid dealers, dirty cops and mass shooters. He knows better than anyone that it's later than we think and that each day brings us closer to the next 9-11. After reading that article and talking to Paul, I had one thought. Bonus episode. Paul put us in touch for an interview. But before I knew it, I was talking to Scott every week.

Hello. What's happening? Oh, not much, not much. I'm sitting outside today. I see you there. Yeah. How are you? Good, man.

I've been doing a lot of outside stuff myself with the daddy doggy daycare and watering plants and shit. Long story short, I agreed to write his memoir with him and our podcast bonus episode turned into this series. I got to confess, it's weird as a journalist being on the inside with an insider. I usually write about cops, not with them. I'm an agnostic feminist lefty Canadian who spent most of her career holding authority to account. He's a devout Christian Republican American from the South who bleeds blue.

We definitely have our clashes and agree to disagree on many subjects. But where we come together is trying to understand what drives groups like The Bass. There are very few people who have spent so many years seeing that lack of respect for human life up close, witnessing that hate. The time for words has ended. The time for words has ended. The time for podcasts has ended. Derail some fucking trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies. You know, you can think of them as like Tim McVeigh's children or Tim McVeigh's little

cousins. At least 49 people have been killed in two mosques in Christchurch. In Charleston, South Carolina, nine people were killed in a shooting at a historic African-American church. The Associated Press is reporting that at least 10 people were killed in a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Eight people are dead after a gunman opened fire at a shopping mall in Texas.

Scott's perspective is one we rarely hear. Journalists report, academics analyze in a pine, lawyers debate the law. You get more than just a 30,000 foot view. I mean, you're right there. You're not guessing. But what does it look like from the inside when far right extremists believe they're among a fellow believer? This is what they said. This is what they talked about. We had a few drinks and they're saying,

hey, what would really be cool is if we start killing a bunch of people and you're going, oh, okay, all right, well, okay, that's different. When you're spending your days and nights with violent bikers for a year and a half and some of them become your friends or pretending to sling hillbilly heroin with the pill mills of the deep south. What does that do to you as a person to always be living a lie? You get a up close and personal perspective. That's coming up on Agent Pale Horse. on Agent Pale Horse.

I was like, Scott will never fit in there. He is just country. It's all get out. There was a mystique about him because he wasn't around him all the time. I can't just walk over there into a sea of testosterone and leather and say, hey, you guys ride? We've never killed anyone yet, but we've had people medevacked out by a helicopter.

I'm like, just get out of my house. And he looked at me and said, so I just vouch for you. So don't fuck this up. This series was written and produced by me, Michelle Shepard, senior producer Ashley Mack, and producer Eunice Kim. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Our intern was Rachel DeGasparis.

Special thanks to Andrew Friesen, Lara Antonelli, the CBC Reference Library, Ryan Thorpe, the Winnipeg Free Press, Rolling Stone and Paul Soloterov, Sean Powers, Oralation Studios and Evolvment Music. Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez are our executive producers. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. This series was produced alongside a book I wrote with Scott, codename Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. You can catch up with season one of White Hot Hate wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying this series and want to help new listeners discover the show,

please take some time to give us a rating and review on whichever is your chosen app. It really helps. That was the first episode of Agent Palehorse. If you like what you heard, episode two is waiting for you right now. Find and follow Agent Palehorse on CBC's White Hot Hate feed so you don't miss an episode. You can just search for White Hot Hate wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.